Faith + Reason = Truth

As mentioned in a previous post on Nintendo's Wii, I'm currently under the sway of a book by Kim and Mauborgne called Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Marketspace and Make Competition Irrelevant from the early 2000's about the strategy of creating products/services that create new demand, rather than incrementally improve and fight over shares of existing demand.  Growing the pie, if you will, rather than grabbing for a bigger slice.  Nothing new there, but something about it has me intrigued.
Take the luxury fashion industry.  Companies like Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales, Saks, and Nordstrom battle for more (of each other's) customers, constantly checking up on each other's "strategies" (which typically boils down to how many and where new stores are opening, or which ones are being updated/remodeled, etc.)  Neiman's gets credit for effort though, going so far as to launch an experiment in getting new customers into the NM brand through the opening of a few stores as their new Cusp concept, targeting younger/hipper customers.  I haven't been in one yet, but I've been told that they're not much different from any other luxury retail store, even using many of the same designers.  All of these retailers compete on "service", which means nothing to most people:  don't these customers EXPECT high levels of service from any of these retailers?  Or "selection":  aren't you going to find some mix of Armani, Prada, D&G, Chanel, etc. in all of them?  Yes, you are.
So why not try something totally totally unique and different for your experimental concept?  If the objective is to get new/younger potential fashionistas in there, maybe try luring them with something like fashion education exposure and experiential emotion as they shop.  Perhaps put the Italian designers in an Italy wing, Americans or Japanese in their own wings, France in its place, etc.  Have the wings in different architectural styles to convey a sense of location, and have large (or small) splashes of knowledge of the history of specific fashion houses/designers or the luxury fashion industry in general worked in via posters or museum-style information cards or whatever.
I take my inspiration from recent visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Fiesta Texas in San Antonio and the pretty new Texas State History Museum in Austin, all of which transported me to different times and places depending on which section of their facilities I was in.  I think this is the kind of thing that would differentiate your brand and give people an actual reason to shop at your place rather than someone else's.  And it could grow the marketspace with an untapped ocean of people who would like to shop at these places but are intimidated and/or have no reason to go and spend lots of money on a dress or handbag that, in their minds, is no different than the knockoffs they can purchase at 1/20 the price.  When they experience and learn WHY or HOW these items and processes are truly different, they could be enticed to splurge or indulge themselves or someone else.  Why not?  What do these retailers have to lose?