shots Issue 174 (Cover 1) by shots

BRTHR

PROMO PRODIGIES

Trevor Robinson

TAKING ADLAND BY QUIET STORM

Dave Monk

HANDY WITH ADS

Margo Mars Fashion Focus

VICKY LAWTON’S CREATIVE HUNGER

SHONA HEATH SETS THE SCENE

DIESEL’S FLAWED GENIUS

LIEF’S FOUNDER ON LIONESSES AND LESSONS IN LIFESTYLE

“We are proud to present our brand new digital platform: the shots Showreel (reel.shots.net). This will continue the work of the DVD by highlighting the most creative advertising work from across the globe. It’ll also showcase amazing music videos, branded content, short ﬁlms and more – hosted on a slick, Netﬂix-esque platform.”

“‘Bloody hell, another ﬁve minutes wasted watching pretty people looking gloomy but groomed as a director tells them, presumably, to look into the middle distance at something both interesting, but also slightly confusing, before accidentally-on-purpose shedding some of their expensive clothes as a tiger meanders by.’”

IFashion, it’s said, moves with the times. And so does shots

You may have noticed that there is no DVD accompanying this fashion-focussed issue. To view all the stylish spots and top work featured in this edition of the magazine and on shots.net, it’s no longer a case of popping a disc into a drive. Instead, we are proud to present our brand new digital platform: the shots Showreel.

The new Showreel (reel.shots. net) will continue the work of the DVD by highlighting the best, most creative advertising work from across the globe. It will also showcase amazing music videos, outstanding branded content, original short films and the most talented new directors alongside custom themes and countryspecific content – all hosted on a slick, Netflix-esque platform.

t’s fair to say that in the not-toodistant past, any fashion ﬁlm that dropped into the collective shots inbox was met with a weary groan. A disconsolate roll of the eyes or shake of the head could usually be translated as, “Bloody hell, another ﬁve minutes wasted watching pretty people looking gloomy but groomed as a director tells them, presumably, to look into the middle distance at something both interesting, but also slightly confusing, before accidentally-on-purpose shedding some of their expensive clothes as a tiger meanders by.” Or something. It was pretentious and, more damningly, unimaginative stu .

special, the Best of January and February 2018, the Best Ads of 2017 and a replication of the eight most recent DVDs published, from issue 166 through to issue 173. So drop by when you have a moment and fancy some quality Showreel and chill time. As for us, we’ll be slipping on our Louboutins and strutting o into the high-powered world of fashion advertising.

Does anyone follow the Twitter account @PerfumeAds? It only came into existence at the start of this year but is, essentially, a brilliant skewering of clichéd fragrance ads and their utter disregard for normalcy and unapologetic embracing of ridiculous imagery masquerading as art. It’s a brilliant spoof. At least, I think it’s a spoof.

“It’s ideas that capture the collective imagination,” says BBH London’s Lindsay Nuttall, “[and] when this is missing, something big is lost.” Indeed. And in the past few years fashion houses and brands have begun to embrace a more creative approach to promoting their wares, one that much less frequently involves the simple notion of ‘catalogues come to life’.

As with the DVD, you can choose to play individual spots, a whole section or the entire reel, from start to ﬁnish. One way in which the new shots Showreel will di er from the DVD is that we will publish our editors’ picks of the best commercial work at the end of every month, rather than on the current bi-monthly cycle of the shots magazine.

So, this issue of shots is our fashion special, and Selena Schleh, our fashionable features editor, has donned her powder pink (this year’s ‘in’ colour, apparently) Hunter boots to wade through the fashion industry’s ever-expanding output.

Over the course of this issue we talk to Dutch directing duo Lernert & Sander, who are melding science with style [page 26] and cover star Ruth Hogben, a director whose fashion ﬁlms are anything but unimaginative [page 20]. Retail guru Mary Portas

Alongside the monthly collections of the top spots will be bespoke features, such as our Best of the Super Bowl LII Special and Valentine’s Day Special plus an array of upcoming showcases on comedy, sport, cars, ethical advertising and more.

Up on the Showreel site at the moment, you’ll ﬁnd a Fashion

And what about the Johnny Depp-starring poster campaign for Dior fragrance, Sauvage, from a couple of years back? The po-faced images were regularly defaced, with the ‘v’ replaced by an ‘s’ and a series of bangers inserted into mock-ups of the picture. Basically, people seem to be becoming not only bored with, but sometimes angry at, the way in which fashion brands, especially high-end ones, are conversing with their customers.

discusses the changing face of fashion promotion [page 74] while fragrance expert Lizzie Ostrom examines scents and sensibilities with a detailed look at perfume advertising [page 48]. There’s also in-depth coverage of why and how the fashion industry has altered their approach to advertising with insight from people such as BBH’s Nuttall and many others [page 40]. It’s all very on-trend, darling.

Elsewhere in this issue, Argentina takes centre stage as, from page 55, our reporter, Olivia Atkins, talks to a host of the country’s creative luminaries and ﬁnds out that, while the ﬁnancial situation in the country couldn’t be much lower, levels of creativity are riding high.

Danny Edwards Editor @shotsmag_dan

But, as with much of the advertising landscape, change is afoot, and there are brands, agencies and creators out there who are looking to engage people in more creative ways. Diesel, from its advertising debut in 1991, always attempted to be a

shots Showreel –our new online platform features the best work from each month, plus themed and bespoke showreels.

shots editor, by fashion illustrator Margarete Gockel

Caught on the catwalk by Margarete Gockel, Danny Edwards, shots editor, ﬂaunts his debonair ﬂair for style. See more of Margarete’s fabulous talent for fashion illustration on page 40 in our fashion advertising feature

Johnny Depp smoulders in a recent ad for Dior’s fragrance, Sauvage, examined in our feature on perfume

Fashion photographer

Bára Prášilová’ developed her unique vision during a childhood spent accompanying her doctor mother on visits to psychiatric wards.

Witness her weirdness from page 32

“And what about the Johnny Depp-starring poster campaign for Dior fragrance, Sauvage, from a couple of years back? The po-faced images were regularly defaced, with the ‘v’ replaced by an ‘s’ and a series of bangers inserted into mock-ups of the picture.”

1 Fashion campaign round-up on page 12, and see page 6 for the fashion special, the work from which can be found on our new shots Showreel

2 The all-black Alice in Wonderlandthemed Pirelli 2018 calendar created by set designer Shona Heath and photographed by Tim Walker – page 42

3 Trevor Robinson’s journey from council estate to Queen’s Honours – a thundering good read from the Quiet Storm founder – page 76

forward-thinking fashion brand, their early campaigns featuring gay kisses and racially segregated swimming pools. However, Diesel’s founder, Renzo Rosso, thought they’d lost that alternative approach and, along with Publicis Italy’s CEO, Bruno Bertelli, sought to regain it. Rather than employ the tropes they felt every other brand adopted, namely ‘perfection’, they took the opposite route, making ﬂaws the centre of their messaging. “If you look at fashion,” says Bertelli, “a lot of brands claim [to o er] freedom, but at the end of the day always direct you to the same territory… perfection.” This issue we’re collating, celebrating and sending down the metaphorical catwalk a selection of people and companies whose approach to fashion advertising ﬂies in the face of the established wisdom.

From Diesel’s paean to imperfections [page 36], set designer Shona Heath’s ﬂights of fancy [page 42] and director/ creative/photographer Vicky Lawton’s ‘visual fanaticism’ [page 32] to opinions on AR [page 56], feminism [page 51] and social relevance [page 14] in fashion, we think we’ve got the industry’s new way of tailoring creativity covered.

Elsewhere in this issue contributing editor, Carol Cooper, talks to one of our two cover stars, Quiet Storm founder Trevor Robinson OBE, about explosive ideas, his quest for diversity in advertising and his ‘let’s ‘ave it!’ attitude [page 76]; Dave Monk, Publicis London ECD, wields a creative hammer as he discusses building brands and his love for colouring in [page 26], and we also speak to two of the jury presidents at the Dubai Lynx about their approach to judging at the upcoming festival [page 68]. It’s a custom-made issue, designed to allow your inner eagle to soar gracefully through the black-and-white skies of creativity, stopping only to feast on tender morsels of inspirational ideation… or something.

Danny Edwards Editor @shotsmag_dan

| Inspiration shots.net

shots 174 / front cover

Mars –portrait created by Dizzy Zebra, with illustration from Dmitry Chaika and photography from MARGO SS18. Read about her in our fashion special, page 57.

shots 174 contributors

Words: Iain Blair, Brune Buonomano, Carol Cooper, Tim Cumming, Lotte Jeffs, Kate Hollowood, David Knight, David Kolbusz, Tom Kuntz, Milla McPhee, Nico Montanari, Emma Willis

Illustration & photography: @rankinassistants, BRTHR, Dmitry Chaika, Rick Dodds, Matt Fone, Margarete Gockel, Steve Fowler, Tim Gutt, Julian Hanford, Carla IJff, Vicky Lawton, Chris Madden, MARGO SS18, Oli McAvoy, Costis Papatheodorou, Chris Saunders, Franck Sauvaire, Spring Studio, Olivier Teepe, Lauren Withrow, Dizzy Zebra

shots 175 / July 2018

The next issue of shots magazine, issue 175, sees us return to the South of France for our annual bumper Cannes Special. With the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity getting a facelift this year, we’ll be examining the very best creative work from the last 12 months, predicting what’s going to pick up a shiny Lion and getting the lowdown from the various jury presidents – in between supping generous amounts of rosé, of course. See you on the Croisette.

shots membership

Membership to shots provides you with all the

connections you need. For more information and to subscribe turn to page 8.

Nike’s

Reviewing the past year in fashion ads we found nine ﬁne ﬁlms and a dead bird

David Kolbusz imagines a class war-themed yacht ad that never set sail

Matthew

Andy Fowler of Brothers and Sisters on good gear

Tom Kuntz recalls warping bunny mouths for Skittles

BRTHR’s directing style is gory, gorgeous and totally their own – until it’s nicked 26 CREATIVEPROFILE

Just give Dave Monk a set of crayons and a hammer and he’s happy for hours

76 THEWAY I SEE IT

Amazing tales of Tango glory and toxic Tories from Trevor Robinson OBE

Rookies speak of ﬁlmy feelings and ﬁlthy animals

This issue has two cover stars: Quiet Storm founder, Trevor Robinson OBE, shot for shots by Franck Sauvaire. Read how he Tango’d to success on page 76.

Cover number two is producer and Lief founder, Margo

Ogilvy’s

Vicky Lawton’s got a lot on her plate, but she’s still hungry for visual feasts

BRAND PROFILE

Diesel founder Renzo Rosso and marketer

Bruno Bertelli on a return to form

40 OPINION

Brune Buonomano, of BETC Luxe, on cultural footprints

42 CREATIVE PROFILE

Fashion’s premier set designer Shona Heath stays grounded with sticky foam

48 DIRECTOR PROFILE

Prada, pop art and potty dreams; the colourful world of Autumn de Wilde

51 OPINION

adam&eveDDB’s Milla McPhee on feminist fashion post the #MeToo hashtags

52 COMPANY PROFILE

How production company Lief is collecting ‘creatures’

56 OPINION

makemepulse’s Emma Willis on how brands need to augment their realities

57 FILM FESTIVALS 15 of the best for fashion 60 PHOTOGRAPHY

Philosopher photographer, Omar Khaleel, ponders fakery in fashion

Fashion Special

facebook.com/shots.net

@shotscreative

@shots_creative

Editorial material for consideration to be submitted to spots@shots.net

Many thanks to those companies that submitted material for consideration on shots.net. If your work didn’t make it this time, please do not be discouraged from sending work in again. If you feel that your company has produced anything that would complement the Creative Showcase please let us know.

All efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of facts and ﬁgures, which to the best of our knowledge were correct at time of going to press. shots accepts no responsibility for loss or damage to material submitted for publication.

shots

Zetland House 5-25 Scrutton Street London EC2A 4HJ

shots membership

Be inspired each day with the best content from across the globe. Stay informed with the latest news, insight and inspiration for the global creative community with a shots membership.

Membership with shots provides you with access to an endless resource of cutting-edge creativity. See the latest Hotshots, hear from new creative and directing talent and keep up-to-date with emerging trends.

Become a member of shots for all the news, insight and inspiration you need.

For membership enquiries please contact info@shots.net

To become a member tel +44 (0)208 955 7047 web subscriptions.shots.net/subscribe

Or contact a membership agent in your territory:

CHINA & TAIWAN

Steven Liu

fargo899@ms35.hinet.net

tel (886 3) 478 9352 fax (886 3) 478 4513

FRANCE, SPAIN, CENTRAL AMERICA & SOUTH AMERICA

Franck Chardon

franck@shots.net

tel (33 0) 9 6404 5659

mo (33 0) 6 4406 5834 fax (33 0) 4 8343 1841

INDIA

Ajay Dhingra sbds@bol.net.in tel (9111) 2871 4138 fax (9111) 2871 2268

KOREA Hee-Joon Kwak ewbc234@hanmail.net

tel (82 31) 855 7444 fax (82 31) 877 7444

TURKEY Muharrem Yildirim evrensely @superonline.com

tel (90 212) 356 7276 fax (90 212) 356 7278

Editor

Danny Edwards dan@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0833 @shotsmag_dan

Deputy Editor Selena Schleh selena@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0887 @selenaschleh

Art Director Sarah Watson art@shots.net

Associate Editor Olivia Atkins olivia@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0922 @olivia__atkins

Contributing Editor Carol Cooper

Marketing Manager

Danielle Cosh danielle.cosh@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0875

International Account Manager, Advertising (awards)

Shane Murphy shane.murphy@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0926

Account Manager, Advertising Mark Malone mark@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0806

Sales Manager, Memberships

Jamie Duffy jamie@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0832

Global Business Development Executive, Memberships

James Robinson james.robinson@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0839

Head of Events

Dee Adeosun dee.adeosun@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0805

Production Manager Jon Cooke (44 20) 8102 0825 jonathon.cooke@mbi.london

Publishing Director Nadia Romdhani nadia.romdhani@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0881

Managing Director Alison Pitchford alison.pitchford@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0912

Chief Executive Ofﬁcer Conor Dignam conor.dignam@mbi.london

A complex game of many halves

TV, CINEMA & SOCIAL

Nike

Nothing Beats a Londoner

Nike’s epic, internet-busting spot, Nothing Beats a Londoner, features a host of young, up-and-coming, Londonbased sportsmen and women alongside established sporting superstars, as well some well-known music artists.

Created by Wieden+Kennedy London and directed by Megaforce, through Riff Raff Films, the ﬁlm features sports people including Harry Kane, Alex Iwobi, Mo Farah and Dina Asher-Smith, and artists such as Skepta and J Hus, as well as kids excelling at sports including football, basketball, ice hockey, boxing and rugby.

Below, Leo Berne and Raphaël Rodriguez, two members of the fourstrong directing collective behind the ﬁlm, give their insight into the making of the spot and reveal why taking on the project was challenging and satisfying in equal measure.

What were your ﬁrst thoughts on receiving the script?

Leo Berne The script was huge, really big, with lots of stages – there was so much stuff; so many long words; so many lines that we didn’t understand – so it took us an afternoon to clearly understand it. But it was really fun, and we were really excited to receive a Nike script that had such ambition and such a lot of references.

Did the scale of the project intimidate you at all?

LB It was intimidating in the way that it was so ambitious and the idea so big, with so many ingredients. We had to make the separate scenes work [and come

together] into one, bigger film. It was an interesting and difficult challenge. The previous Nike campaign we did was Vine videos where you could make a little joke and it was all very self-contained, but with this one we had to find a way to link all the stories into one bigger piece that worked and which also kept the rhythm.

Why do you think it was decided that you would be the best directing team for the job?

LB I think the fact that they [W+K] liked the Vine videos helped, but we also came up with a vision of how to make it all work together. We wanted to nail the relationship between all the kids in the ﬁlm and so we came up with the idea of bringing the kid

shots speaks to the brains behind two artistic and technical triumphs: a hypnotic fashion film that lets the viewer in on the rig ideas behind the big ideas; and Nike’s breezy tale relating the travails of sporty Londoners with a challenging set of mini-films-within-a-film

from the next segment into the end of the previous segment so that they could talk to each other before starting the new scene, and they could talk to the audience through the camera.

How did you approach such a large production?

Raphaël Rodriguez We basically treated each individual segment [of the spot] as its own film. Each segment is a visual representation of what the kid is saying, and each one is a mini-film. What was most challenging was allowing the kids in the film to show amazing skill, sports-wise, but at the same time getting them to talk about it. Because if they talk and then do the trick, the film becomes too long, and too slow. So, it was tricky to arrange a great performance – both sports-wise and acting-wise – with non-professional actors. Most of them had never worked in front of a camera before.

Was the casting a big challenge?

RR It was very hard. For some [segments], we were lucky to ﬁnd the perfect person quickly, like the boxing girl who was

immediately great, and we didn’t need to work too much with her. But for some of the others it was more tough. And it wasn’t necessarily their fault, but you have the client, the agency… everyone wants, and needs, to be on the same page.

Which of the segments was the hardest to create?

LB The second scene, on Kingsland Road, was hard for the talent because the street was really busy, and everybody was looking at the actor and it was hard to control the crowd. The female footballer scene was one of the hardest to achieve. We wanted really tricky camera moves, with a drone. It was very difﬁcult to do, technically, and for her as an actor.

And how was working with a multitude of celebrities?

LB It’s always tricky with celebrities; you have to learn to adapt and you sometimes have to wait around, or you have to reshoot, but that’s part of the job. It felt normal, it wasn’t difﬁcult, it was something we knew we would have to deal with. DE

To read the full interview, visit shots.net

A revealing look at the jigging in the rigging

WEB FILM

Rag & Bone

Why Can’t We Get Along

For its spring/summer 2018 collection, New York label Rag & Bone unveiled a fashion ﬁlm about shifting perspectives which literally pushes the boundaries of the genre.

Co-directed by choreographer Benjamin Millepied, 1stAveMachine’s Bob Partington and SpecialGuest’s Aaron Duffy, Why Can’t We Get Along stars an eclectic mix of talent from the worlds of cinematography, choreography, dance, and ﬁlm, including actors Ansel Elgort and Kate Mara, with music custom-scored by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

Below, Partington and Duffy tell shots about handling multiple camera rigs, the importance of authenticity and working with one of their ﬁlm heroes.

How would you describe the ﬁlm?

Bob Partington We all went into the production of this ﬁlm with the idea that it would be abstract enough that people could draw their own conclusions and create their own stories based on what they saw. We created a space to house experiences for these actors and dancers – for me, it was like a playground where people were like ghosts, they interacted and sometimes ‘got along’. And in the end they left, and we were left with an empty room and a memory.

Aaron Duffy Why Can’t We Get Along is a ﬁlm about perspective. Some of which are disorienting, or even nausea-inducing. You might say that all the different camera views and movements are an answer to the question posed in Thom Yorke’s track. Maybe we can’t get along because all the different points of view make us ill.

Was there a brief from Rag & Bone?

AD We got the best brief imaginable.

Marcus [Wainwright, CEO] and Marissa [Kraxberger, VP, creative] had seen the

work we did for OK Go, so we knew we would do something interesting in-camera. Aside from getting an early look at the colour palette for the collection, there were three keywords that came up at the beginning of the project: ‘authentic’, ‘dark’, and ‘choreography’. After those were established, the team of collaborators got together and the project started to take form. It is a special thing to have a client that will trust you with that kind of brief.

What was the impetus for the concept of the ﬁlm?

AD Authenticity was the starting point. I knew everything should be in-camera, the materials and set design should be raw and the film should make the viewer feel a bit weird. All of those inspiration points made me think of a film hero of mine, Tony Hill, an artist and filmmaker who invented his own camera rigs.

I ﬂew to Cornwall to meet him and we started developing the rig ideas on video calls with Bob Partington. In the end we shipped three of Tony’s rigs (the wheel rig, the falling over slowly rig, and the

satellite rig) to New York for the shoot and the other two we concepted together and built in Brooklyn. For me, Tony is both the answer to the authenticity brief and the inspiration for the concept.

What came ﬁrst, the choreography or the camerawork?

AD The camerawork came ﬁrst, which is a fun break from the traditional process of capturing choreography. In our case, the dance was moulded to the movement of the cameras. The risk here was that it left very little time to develop the dance. I can’t really explain how miraculous it was to watch Benjamin Millepied develop the choreography before our eyes on the one rehearsal day with a group of very different dancers, ABT, Hiplet, Bulletrun Parkour, and Kandi Reign.

What was behind the choice to show how the shots were created?

BP Telling the story with this transparency was important to us. When the viewer can see how things work they become engaged. There’s also a nice juxtaposition

“The solution to any big disagreement is to try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. The five rigs in the film are a metaphor that represents that process.”

between the actors and dancers reacting through the rigged cameras, versus the POV from the steadycam; you get an external sense of hypnotism.

AD Part of the authenticity of the film is the ability to see behind the scenes. It’s important for the viewer to understand a bit about how the rigs work in order to follow the idea of “different perspectives of the world”. The truth is, we can’t see the world through another human being’s eyes. We can only see our own point of view. The solution to any big disagreement is to try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. The five rigs in the film are a metaphor that represents that process. For example, when you see the world through the lens of the wheel rig, Ansel Elgort seems comfy sitting in the middle of that barrel while the world spins around him. But when you see the objective view of that rig, he’s actually being spun around like he’s inside the drum of an industrial dryer. The two different points of view change your understanding of the situation. DE

To read the full interview, visit shots.net

FASHION FILMS’ FINEST YARNS

By the time you read this, the models will have ﬁled off the autumn/winter 2018 catwalks and the designers taken their ﬁnal bows. While the New York-London-MilanParis Fashion Weeks still shape the industry calendar, arguably the most exciting things are happening off the catwalk, as brands embrace an alternative, brave and creative approach in their advertising.

Top marks in that respect go to Gucci, a fashion house that has really shifted the creative goalposts over the past year. Following on from Soul Scene, a 360° film experience which took viewers onto the dancefloor for a Northern Soul-inspired knees-up (and featured an all-black line-up to boot), its autumn/winter 2017 campaign film, Gucci and Beyond, was an enjoyably high-kitsch homage to 50s and 60s sci-fi films, where couture-clad models manned intergalactic space missions and ran around terrorised by a T-Rex.

For the launch of the Marché des Merveilles watch collection, it turned to that most millennial of social interactions: memes. Usually, when luxury brands co-opt popular culture it comes off as cynical, disingenuous or downright cringeworthy but #TFW Gucci (short for ‘That Feeling When’) was a stroke of social genius

(even though the average age of Gucci customers necessitated an introduction explaining what a meme actually is). ‘When he buys you ﬂowers instead of a Gucci watch,’ reads the comment above a 16th century portrait of a dead-eyed Spanish noblewoman. Another image, captioned ‘Watchdog’, simply shows a furry paw sporting a designer timepiece. Lolz. Another breath of fresh air was JellyWolf, Alma Al Har’el’s ﬁlmic tribute to Chanel’s No. 5 fragrance, commissioned

for iD’s Fifth Sense platform. A surreal coming-of-age tale inspired by synaesthesia and lucid dreaming, it’s about as far away from a stuffy fragrance ad as you can get. Perfect for introducing a younger, hipper generation to the iconic interlocking Cs – and an exciting indication of where fashion ﬁlm, once the poor relation to the stills campaign, could be headed.

More brilliant examples of the genre can be seen at the ever-increasing array of dedicated fashion film festivals popping up all over the globe [see our comprehensive guide on page 57], with big winners such as Sound and Vision – a mesmerising ballet of some ‘blue, blue, electric blue’ wool, a wodge of chewing gum and a galaxy of pearls, directed by CANADA for a David Bowie retrospective – illustrating how the definition of ‘fashion film’ has morphed from a piece of content produced by a fashion or beauty brand into an aesthetic.

Prada delivers with the Postman Then there’s the big-name directors sprinkling some serious stardust on fashion ﬁlms. H&M brought in Baz Luhrmann to launch its Erdem collaboration with The Secret Life of Flowers, a lush, Brideshead Revisited-tinged tale of a love triangle set

in a stately home where it’s eternally springtime. Meanwhile Nicholas Winding Refn served up a slice of his signature, hyper-stylised aesthetic for luxury online department store 24 Sèvres, which saw shop mannequins come to life and dance through the streets of the city.

There’s more dancing – along with crazy camera angles that’ll make your head spin – in Rag & Bone’s cool spring/summer 2018 offering, Why Can’t We Get Along, co-directed and choreographed by Black Swan’s Benjamin Millepied (see page 10). Bringing together a diverse cast of hot young actors, dancers and musicians, it’s a new breed of fashion film: one which engages the brain as well as the senses. In other news, fashion is definitely lightening up and learning to laugh at itself – albeit in a slightly self-conscious, pigeon-toed way. Vogue brought us an entertaining visual pun in Elle Fanning’s Fan Fantasy where the actress fans herself –and then her adoring fans – with a series of fans (geddit?) Meanwhile Prada continued its short film series with The Postman Dreams 2, helmed by Autumn de Wilde [see profile, page 48] and starring Elijah Wood as a delivery boy with secret agent aspirations. Beautifully art directed and shot

in glossy soft-focus – this is Prada, after all – the ﬁlms are surprisingly funny: witness Amber Valletta deliver a right hook to her cheating boyfriend, then in the next breath coo over her new Galleria handbag. Who knew supermodels could do comedy? Perhaps it just takes the right script….

Dodgy Deisels and a dead bird

There’s clever humour outside of film, of course. In print, adam&eveDDB continued their tongue-in-chic work for Harvey Nichols with Dead Rare, enlisting a rather unusual model – a taxidermied Northern Bald Ibis, practically extinct – to sport a rare fine jewellery collection. And full marks go to Diesel for its recent self-spoofing stunt at New York Fashion Week. The brand set up a ‘Deisel’ pop-up shop selling limited-edition Diesel threads under the guise of knock-offs as part of its excellent Go With the Flaw campaign [read more in our interview with founder Renzo Rosso, page 36].

To savage one of Yves Saint Laurent’s best quotes: “fashions fade, but creativity is eternal”.

To watch our selection of the best fashion campaigns and ﬁlms, visit the new shots Showreel (reel.shots.net).

Selena Schleh’s top picks of the past year’s best fashion campaigns brings us sci-ﬁ chic, dancing dolls, social lolz – and a stu ed bird

1 Gucci, Gucci and Beyond

2 Gucci, Soul Scene

3 Gucci, #TFW Gucci

4 iD/Chanel, JellyWolf

5 David Bowie retrospective, Sound and Vision

6 H&M, The Secret Life of Flowers

7 24 Sèvres, Where Fashion Comes to Life

8 Harvey Nichols, Dead Rare

9 Vogue, Elle Fanning’s Fan Fantasy

10 Diesel, Go With The Flaw pop-up shop

OPINION

Lotte Jeffs

The same old quest for the new

“There’s a misconception that fashion magazines are all Devil Wears Prada frippery – there’s a bit of that, sure, but it’s performed with a knowing wink.”

Next week I’m hosting my first editorial-style meeting at Ogilvy. I’ve asked Mick (Mahoney, chief creative officer), Kevin (Chesters, chief strategy officer) and the team of creatives, planners and PMs on a particular account to come with ideas. And I’m not talking big, conceptual advertising ideas that must be strategised and

WhenOgilvy London felt it needed some ‘rogue bees’ in the shop, i.e. individualists who would buzz off, away from the swarm, and seek their own ways of working, they hired Lotte Jeffs, former deputy editor of ELLE as creative director. Here she reveals how a magazine editor’s quest for social relevance and hot new ‘stories’ are just what adland needs right now

theorised and put into research before going anywhere. I’m talking story ideas – inspiration ripped from newspapers or magazines, found on Twitter, Instagram, a random Reddit thread, overheard in lifts, debated at events, noticed on Netﬂix, or downloaded in podcasts. These ideas might be scrappy and small but they are mined from the zeitgeist and they talk to a real world, happening now. It’s how we kicked off every day at ELLE, the magazine where I was deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief for three years before ‘pivoting’ in to adland. It meant the team had its ﬁnger on the white-hot centre of what was happening around us.

Polymaths in Prada

There’s a misconception that fashion magazines are all Devil Wears Prada frippery – there’s a bit of that, sure, but it’s performed with a knowing wink. The truth is the people behind glossy magazines are extremely well-informed on everything from politics to fashion and celebrity, ﬁlm, music, sport, the arts… at ELLE we were part of the conversations and this was reﬂected in the features, articles and interviews we produced in print and online.

When Mick recruited me as a creative director at Ogilvy, he asked me to bring this kind of thinking (and doing) into his department. He recognised ‘social relevance’ as something the advertising industry could be better at, and he was self-aware enough to realise that making real changes in this area meant looking outwards and bringing new people, with different perspectives into the fold to challenge the status quo. Mick subscribes to the ‘10 per cent rogue bees’ theory. As much as ‘rogue bees’ sounds like the next Pixar movie, what he means is that in every beehive there are a small number of bees who go against the swarm. They ignore what the majority of their colleagues are doing and strike out on their own, ﬁnding new sources of food so that when the pollen runs out at known locations they are ready to adapt to a new way of working and they don’t just, well... die. For Ogilvy to thrive, the agency believes it needs 10 percent of its people to work in a completely different way to everyone else.

I’ve worked on magazines for more than 15 years. I don’t know how an advertising creative director is supposed to behave because I’ve never

been one or worked with one before and this means I can just get on with the job, unencumbered by the weight of what others expect from me. But I’m a month into my tenure at Ogilvy now and I‘m beginning to wonder how different the role of a CD and a magazine editor actually is. The core practice is the same: there’s a brief – in advertising it’s far more expertly defined than it ever is in magazine publishing, an industry which is run almost entirely on instinct, whimsy and personal taste each month; ‘let’s do a love issue!’ ‘Let’s do a change issue!’ No one ever asks why. An editor discusses ideas with her team, then commissions the good ones. The editor is the conductor and, just like a creative director, guides the creatives from concept to production. In my time as an editor I’ve created film, podcasts, social campaigns, posters, websites, newsletters, email marketing, subscription adverts, consumer events, awards ceremonies and countless commercial brand partnerships which play out in all these spaces. Nothing I’ve done in my first four weeks at Ogilvy feels unfamiliar, and I’m confident any of the brilliant CDs I’m working with here could just as easily take the reins of a magazine.

From hair extensions to brand extensions

It’s probably only in the past few years that these two professions have become so closely aligned. Certainly, when Tina Brown was ruling New York as the all-powerful editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair in the roaring 80s, she was entirely focussed on ‘the book’ (and how brilliant the product was for it). Now a magazine editor is tasked with all manner of brand extensions. I’ve had editor colleagues who have gone from labouring over feature copy one minute to having to develop ready meals with their magazine’s name on them the next. Likewise, what it means to make an ‘advert’ has also exploded in scope, and the best CDs can tell a story across different mediums. Ideas are the beating heart of both industries and I predict that over the next few years more of my creatively agile editorial peers will be tempted to jump ship. A magazine journalist’s hustle, encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture and thirst for the new could help take agencies out of their echo chambers and into a brave, new, socially-engaged world. S

OFF SCRIPT

David

Kolbusz

Sail away with me

In the world of advertising there are always bottomdrawer scripts and ideas that have, so far and for various reasons, remained unmade. There are also those scripts that started with great potential, but ended up as damp squibs. Then there are those that could not – indeed, should not – ever be made. In his ongoing series, David Kolbusz, CCO of Droga5 London, plays devil’s advocate with the imaginary scripts that taste forgot

CLIENT

Trinity Yachts

TITLE

Because You Can

We open on a woman dressed in a power suit standing on a roof terrace of a metropolitan high rise. She’s in mid-conversation with a group of young well-do-dos enjoying crudités and idle chit chat about some bullshit new restaurant called La Bouche. As one of them stops the conversation to point out the sky glowing magenta, she rolls her eyes, makes a jerk-off motion with her hand and turns to camera.

SPOKESWOMAN: We’ve all been there. You’re at a mixer atop a ‘lavish’ penthouse apartment when someone stops the conversation to admire the sunset. By the time everyone’s done talking about it, the evening feels like it’s been as long and painful as the outdated Southeast Asian torture method of slowly growing bamboo shoots through a captive victim’s body. We cut to her walking up the steps of a town hall as we hear the din of a soirée in full swing. Well-to-do over-50s mill about outside dressed in their ﬁnest evening wear, as dead-eyed young catering staff offer Beluga caviar served on tiny spoons to each person that shufﬂes in. Our spokeswoman plucks one from the tray as she steps inside.

SPOKESWOMAN: Or how many times have you been hosting a thousand-dollar-aplate fundraiser for some pet cause nobody will give one tenth of a fuck about six months from now, and the venue looks like something a psychopath wouldn’t deign to use as a kill room?

She surveys her environs, takes a mouthful of her caviar, and spits the US$35,000/kg ﬁsh roe out in disgust.

SPOKESWOMAN: You may be thinking to yourself, ‘Is this as good as it gets?’, and the answer is a resounding ‘no’. You’re better than this. Anything in life that you do – from the fundraisers you stage, to the dinners you cater, to the chem-sex parties you host – everything is better on a superyacht.

We cut to our woman striding along the berth of the Riva San Biagio in Venice, Italy, in front of a large, impressive boat that dwarfs the buildings it’s moored in front of, casting the boardwalk into darkness and ruining the view for all passersby. She steps onto the gangway and boards the vessel.

SPOKESWOMAN: I know what you’re thinking: ‘Superyachts are an unnecessary extravagance that make me seem like a hateful cipher, disconnected from the concerns of pretty much all of humanity’. But while it’s true that poor people don’t have the most positive impressions of the rich, it’s not for the reasons you think.

She stands at the stern of the superyacht’s upper deck, holding a bottle of Champagne. Next to her is a pyramid of multiple Champagne glasses. Oddly, the one at the very top is absurdly large. She starts to pour the Champagne into the top glass, only instead of it cascading down the tower, it all stays in the ﬁrst piece of stemware.

SPOKESWOMAN: So often we assume it’s because the trickle-down effect as an economic theory has failed in practice, and that the borderline criminal reduction of taxes on corporations and the wealthy –designed to stimulate business in the

short term and beneﬁt society at large in the long term – has only led to a greater divide between the rich and poor; effectively destroying the middle class and returning most Western societies to a de-facto caste system in which your station is life is determined by the wealth that you’re born into.

She sets down the empty bottle on Carrara marble countertop, picks up a pair of binoculars and stares back at the mainland.

SPOKESWOMAN: But no. The reason the poor hate the rich is because they can see us. And do you know where they can’t see us? Miles from shore on a superyacht.

Our spokeswoman walks up a winding staircase to another deck where we see an oak-panelled ballroom boasting an ornate crystal chandelier and prime views of the clear blue waters below.

SPOKESWOMAN: That’s right. You can’t hate what you can’t see. Out of sight, out of mind. And when the impoverished aren’t watching, you can have all the fun you want, guilt-free. Racing jet skis?

Check. Underwater tours in amphibious vehicles? Check. Hosting lavish parties staffed with paid escorts of both genders? Check. On a Trinity Yacht you can get away with murder.

Our spokeswoman now stands on the bow of the boat, staring off into the distance, holding a heavy book.

SPOKESWOMAN: And by murder we mean that almost literally. Now, we’re not saying you can kill whomsoever you want, whenever you want, but maritime law is pretty nebulous. And if you’re in international waters? Cole Porter said it best.

Anything Goes by Cole Porter starts to play on the ship’s tannoy. The camera tracks with our spokeswoman as she walks further down the deck.

SPOKESWOMAN: Look, when the day of reckoning comes – and it will come –the class wars will inspire carnage like the civilised world hasn’t seen since Marie Antoinette was forced to eat shit cake. The land-bound rich will retreat to their walled compounds until they’re overtaken by the angry impoverished. Multimillionaires will use regular millionaires as human shields. But those of you in the billionaires club – those of you smart enough to buy a Trinity superyacht? You’ll be setting sail on the open seas instead of drowning in a river of blood.

See? You can put a price on life. And that price starts at US$12,000,000.

TAGLINE: Trinity Yachts. Because no one wants to die on land at the hands of poor people.

“You can’t hate what you can’t see. Out of sight, out of mind. And when the impoverished aren’t watching, you can have all the fun you want, guilt-free… On a Trinity Yacht you can get away with murder. ” S

THE BAD OLD GOOD OLD DAYS

Robin

Derrick, executive creative director of Spring and former creative director of British Vogue, looks back at Bowie, Basquiat, the Vietnam War, the photography of Don McCullin, 70s movie haircuts, 80s New Wave and rotten old Apples

What is the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen in the last few months?

Mainstream advertising is not really a place I look for creativity. I do think this season’s print fashion campaigns are good; Gucci, YSL, Miu Miu. The return of great fashion photography feels modern again.

What’s your favourite website?

Lisaeldridge.com – my wife’s stunning and authentic beauty channel. This is how it’s done. No sponsored content, YouTube revenue donated to charity.

What website do you use most regularly? WeTransfer.

Who’s your favourite designer?

Marc Newson; friend and #mancrush.

I’m basically jealous. I wish I had done some of the work he has created. And he is so nice with it!

What product could you not live without?

(Yawn) My phone and laptop.

What product hasn’t been invented yet that would make your life/job better?

A single product that replaced both the above. No, it’s not the iPad…

What’s the best ﬁlm you’ve seen over the last year?

New film: Good Time, a great indie film starring Robert Pattinson. Old film: Two-Lane Blacktop from 1971, which follows a ‘55 Chevy GTO race across the US. It features James Taylor and Dennis Wilson and the best movie haircut on a girl (Laurie Bird).

TV: A 10-part PBS documentary, The Vietnam War. No words, just watch it.

Who’s your favourite photographer?

Right now, I’m looking back at the war reportage of Don McCullin; “if the pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”.

Mac or PC?

Are you fucking kidding or what? Apple owner since Apple II. External hard drives, the lot, even when they were rubbish. I wish there was an alternative.

What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to?

Flash Gordon.

What’s your favourite magazine?

American Hot Rod

What track/artist would you listen to for inspiration?

I’ve always returned to David Bowie; Young Americans is his best LP. Best track? Can You Hear Me

What show/exhibition has most inspired you recently?

The exhibition that has inspired me the most in the last year has been Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boom for Real, which I am sure will spike renewed interest in New York’s late 70s/early 80s New Wave scene... Expect a revival of grafﬁti artist Futura 2000, fashion designer Steven Sprouse, director Jim Jarmusch, the music club CBGB and Blondie.

If you could live in one city, where would it be?

London, the only liveable capital in the world. But I fantasise about living in Rome.

If you could have been in any band, what band would you choose?

Either [Bowie’s backing band] The Spiders From Mars or The Sex Pistols.

What inspires Derrick:

1 The war photography of Don McCullin

2 Robert Pattinson in Good Time

3 The Sex Pistols

4 David Bowie’s Young Americans

5 Basquiat’s exhibition, Boom For Real

6 Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird and James Taylor in Two-Lane Blacktop

7 Gucci’s Spring/Summer 2018 campaign, with art by Ignasi Monreal

8 Flash Gordon

9 The original Apple II

10 The designs of Marc Newson –Embryo Chair

“The exhibition that has inspired me the most in the last year has been Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boom for Real, which I am sure will spike renewed interest in New York’s late 70s/early 80s New Wave scene...”

BRTHR BRTHR BRTHR

Kaleidoscopes of fast-cut, richly-coloured, psychedelic images that blend beauty and violence and hover somewhere between dreams and nightmares – the music videos of Alex Lee and Kyle Wightman display a remarkably distinct style given their youth. As they tell David Knight, since setting up as directing duo BRTHR, they’ve worked hard to develop this style, and though not overly chu ed to see it ripped o by others, they’re happy that it’s led to commercial work for such brands as adidas and YSL

Alex Lee and Kyle Wightman – aka BRTHR (pronounced Brother) – have such a distinctive directing style, recognising their work is easy. But trying to explain what happens in their music videos is a challenge. Mere words hardly do them justice.

Take their recent video for YouTuber-turned-pop star Joji’s track, Window. It’s a hallucinatory, violent, captivating minimovie, where Joji spends most of his time in chains underwater (but still smoking) while his girlfriend engages in stylised battles with various villains around Tokyo. It has a dazzling array of visual motifs and extraordinary colour-saturated transitions – like a bonkers psychedelic superhero movie.

In last year’s video for Travis Scott’s Butterfly E ect, BRTHR transform hip-hop video conventions with a combination of restless camerawork, and raw video e ects, as Scott hangs from his speeding Lamborghini in the Hollywood hills, and CGI butterflies flutter out of girls’ mouths.

And like a psychedelic Sin City, BRTHR’s video for The Weeknd’s In The Night sees the singer lusting after his favourite showgirl (model Bella Hadid) while she and her fellow dancers murder vicious Yakuza gangsters in a glowing blood-red downpour. But again, you really have to see it.

Watching BRTHR’s work is like getting the adrenaline rush of a top action movie during an acid trip. Their visual domain is somewhere between cinematic reality and a surreal netherworld – exciting, unpredictable, and as immersive as a videogame.

When your Goosebumps get grabbed

With the inventiveness of their camerawork, editing, visual e ects, use of colour, and sound design, it’s a signature that would be very hard to emulate – so you would think. But as their work has become more high profile, Lee and Wightman have noticed signs that they are increasingly being ‘referenced’ by the next generation of filmmakers. They say their other Travis Scott video, for the horror-influenced Goosebumps, has been directly copied. “Some younger videographers and directors, nowadays, they have no artistic integrity – they will just straight up rip shit o ,” says Lee. “This one kid started ripping some sound e ects from our videos and using them in his videos –and they get a lot of views.”

With his talk of “younger directors” and “kids”, Lee makes BRTHR sound like grizzled veterans. In fact, they are only in

their mid-20s themselves. But they have been making commissioned music videos since they were barely out of their teens, and in the past year they have added some heavy-hitting commercials to their name.

They were recruited by adidas Originals to helm an edgy campaign with rappers Young Thug, Playboi Carti and 21 Savage. They then directed their ﬁrst fragrance ad, a commercial for Yves Saint Laurent perfume Black Opium, which revealed that the BRTHR signature style had survived the leap from music to advertising, something that they were clear was their goal: “We like to take on projects where we can do that,” says Wightman, “and we were able to really retain our visual style for those spots.” Although the YSL ad that went to air might have lacked their usual edge, the director’s cut version features that distinctive distressed imagery and irrepressible momentum, as Edie Campbell, the face of Black Opium, and her buddies head out into the steamy Bangkok night.

Happy to handle the bad boy rappers

For Crazy Isn’t Humble, their adidas Originals spot last year, three hip-hop stars goof around their luxury hotel suites, demonstrating that, as Lee says, “rappers are the new rock stars now.” The use of di erent formats, including portrait-shaped, gives parts of the ﬁlm that raw, social-media style phone footage feel. For the second ﬁlm, Young Thug, Playboi Carti and 21 Savage leave the comfort of their hotel suites and, according to Lee, “things get even crazier. A lot of clients come to us for our music video aesthetic now, which has been cool,” he goes on. “The second adidas campaign also continues that Crazy Isn’t Humble sort of style that we have been building with [ad agency] Johannes Leonardo.”

Wightman adds: “Each one of the [ﬁlms featuring the rappers] almost feel like scenes that could exist within one of our videos. We just had a bit more freedom to build the sets.”

The duo realise that it is not just their style that attracts the agencies. Their experience of working with major hip-hop artists is a beneﬁt on jobs where youth-orientated brands are buying into the unmatchable cool and credibility of ‘bad boy’ rappers – some of whom are not renowned for being easy collaborators. “Sometimes they are very hard to work with,” reﬂects Lee with a chuckle. “We know how to handle these guys.”

1/2/3 Travis Scott, Butterﬂy Effect

Opposite BRTHR, aka Kyle Wightman (left) and Alex Lee

“It was a really unique visual universe that we had been trying to accomplish for a long time. It was super complex to shoot, very challenging and we pulled it off.”

Apart from always employing a really strong 1st AD to run the set with military precision (“that’s crucial,” says Lee), one tactic to minimise any issues with artists appears to be the sheer level of activity going on during their shoots. “We brainstorm and come up with an overabundance of ideas, and then we try to put them all in the video,” explains Wightman, “So our shoots can be really hectic. Typically we’re running multiple cameras. We just try to really capture as much as we can and get as many vignettes and put as many ideas in there as possible.”

For any artist coming onto their set for the ﬁrst time, Lee says it will be unlike any previous video they have done. “I’d say working with us is a very boutique experience. We’re very hands on – Kyle runs the cameras on the B-cam [secondary camera] a lot. Then I do all the editing. For the cut, honestly, I’m using maybe 50 per cent of what the DP shot, 25 per cent of what Kyle or someone else shot, and 25 per cent of what our other friend from ﬁlm school shot.”

Editing is of equal importance to the shoot, so, not surprisingly, they rarely hand over editing and grading duties to outside sources. Lee prefers to handle everything, working on ageing Final Cut Pro 7 software to hone the trademark weatherbeaten VFX aesthetic. And for their videos BRTHR do not supply rough cuts for bands or labels to comment on either – with good reason, they say. “There are so many elements that have to come together in the edit that you can’t possibly understand what it’s going to feel and look like until it’s pretty much done,” explains Wightman.

Fast-tracked to success via Tokyo slo-mo

Lee and Wightman met at the School of Visual Arts in New York and started working together while still studying. Lee, who was born and raised in Japan, and New Yorker Wightman then dropped out of college together in 2013 to start BRTHR. By that point, Lee had made Tokyo Slo-Mode, a ‘school project’ shot on a return trip to Japan. It is an observational montage of Toyko street life employing slow-motion, frame-cutting and other techniques, and Lee describes it as “a life-changer”. When it gained a prized Vimeo Sta Pick, the ﬁlm’s resemblance to music video led to promo commissions and the pair have never looked back.

Their early videos, for rising acts like Maejor, MS MR and

Ben Kahn quickly got them spotted by production community StrangeLove, to which they signed. Not much later, they were shooting a big budget video in India for female rapper Iggy Azalea. “It was literally like jumping in the deep end,” says Lee. “We’d never run a big set. It was intimidating, but we handled it.” It may not have been entirely successful, but the Azalea video highlighted the importance of their retaining control of the creative process. From that moment on they worked hard on developing their signature style. Many would describe it as being dramatically dark, although BRTHR don’t wholeheartedly agree with that summary. “There was a lot of experimentation involved in the ﬁrst few years of working, culminating in this style that you see,” Wightman says. “I’d say we have based it on a particular aesthetic and a mood, but there are playful moments that we try to incorporate. On the Goosebumps video there are 3D anime girls dancing at one point.” “Another thing we’ve been exploring is a crazy climax,” Lee interjects. “Throughout the video it’s kind of crazy, but then the climax is even crazier.” That’s borne out in BRTHR’s more recent videos. In Joji’s Window, the heroine ends her adventures by blasting o into space, followed shortly afterwards by Joji.

Happy outcomes from butterﬂy e ects

Lee thinks that the best example of their work to date is Travis Scott’s Butterfly E ect. “It was a really unique visual universe that we had been trying to accomplish for a long time. It was super-complex to shoot, very challenging and we pulled it o .” He adds that “someone ripped it o , like, a month later.” But despite their concerns about inferior copied versions of their videos lurking online, it is hard to imagine that BRTHR’s forward momentum will be deflected by their imitators. Such is the quality and prolific level of their creativity, they look assured to continue to rise, and ultimately take the commercials world by storm. And it could happen this year. “For us, 2018 is about segueing fully into commercials, and doing jobs that we really believe in,” says Wightman, while his partner acknowledges that they are still young themselves, with time on their side.

“Sometimes we lose jobs purely based [on the fact that we are] young and [because we don’t] have many commercials on our reel yet,” says Lee. “Hopefully, with YSL and adidas, and stu like that, we’ll get there.” We imagine they will.

1/3 Travis Scott,Goosebumps

2 Joji, Window

“We like to take on projects where we can do that, and we were able to really retain our visual style for those spots.”

WHAT INSPIRES BRTHR…

What’s your favourite ever ad?

ALEX LEE That Guy Ritchie Nike football one [To the Next Level] is a classic.

KYLE WIGHTMAN adidas Tubular, directed by David Lynch (1993).

What product could you not live without?

AL Lately, Coke Zero Sugar. KW Polar Seltzer.

What are your thoughts on social media?

AL It’s here to stay. Use it to your advantage.

KW Less is more.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot?

AL Drink copious amounts of Red Bull, soda and coffee. Literally up to 11 cans and cups sometimes.

KW Coffee and Red Bull.

What’s the last ﬁlm you watched and was it any good?

AL Disaster Artist was a very interesting story and character proﬁle of [the eccentric ﬁlmmaker] Tommy Wiseau.

KW Fantastic Mr. Fox. Classic.

What’s your favourite piece of tech?

AL One of my faves is a coloured light bulb system you can control with your phone. My entire apartment has impeccable lighting. KW Samsung Galaxy Note.

What ﬁlm do you think everyone should have seen?

AL The Matrix, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fallen Angels, Rushmore, Pulp Fiction

KW Blood Simple

What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to?

AL Emo Kid; Spiderman.

KW George Costanza [from sitcom Seinfeld].

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be?

AL Musician; 100 per cent.

KW In the restaurant biz.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know…

AL I love Friends and just acquired a poster with all the cast’s autographs.

KW I’m obsessed with bass.

DAVE MONK

“The idea of an agency-built hammer is great. You can build shit with it. You can knock stuff down with it. There is nothing like hitting something with a hammer.”

Looking back on Dave Monk’s career –which includes gong-laden work for BBH and Grey (News UK’s Unquiet Film Series) – it’s amusing to reflect on the strange little habits and happenings that might have shaped his progress... Was it his tendency to repeat to careers advisors and interviewers that he liked ‘colouring in’ that got him where he is today – i.e. ECD of Publicis London? Or the time he left a portfolio holding two years’ work on a bus? He tells Danny Edwards about the joy of hitting hammers and crafting fine work that makes clients proud

“...there was nothing on computer, nothing saved, it was all electroset and photocopies. It was a nightmare, but it was a lesson in preciousness – we had to decide what to rebuild and what we could do better.”

“Iwas a big Fred Dibnah fan,” states Dave Monk, towards the end of our chat. Dibnah, a British steeplejack and television personality, who from the 70s though to the early 2000s presented programmes about chimneys, steam engines, industrial buildings and their creation – and destruction – is maybe not the inspiration many successful creatives would point to, but, for Monk, it makes perfect sense. “He would go and build towers and knock them down and I think the idea of an agency-built hammer is great. You can build shit with it. You can knock stu down with it. There is nothing like hitting something with a hammer.”

Over the course of his near 20-year career, Monk has put his love of building things to good use. But, instead of chimney stacks and suspension bridges, his skill has been in building brands. The Publicis London executive creative director has wielded his metaphorical hammer on projects such as Gordon’s gin, Mentos, Tourism Ireland and The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers and has no plans on downing tools any time soon. Though, like many successful creatives before him, Monk states that he never really had a particular plan to open his tool box within the advertising industry.

Seeks career in colouring and playing pool

In his early teens, during a discussion with a school careers advisor, he volunteered the nugget of information that he ‘liked colouring in’. Some sort of career in art, the young Monk was envisioning. The careers advisor

recommended graphic communication or technical drawing as a possible path and suggested Monk take a raft of A levels, which, inexplicably, didn’t include art. So, after redoing his A levels, adding art to the mix, Monk headed to art college and, eventually, university. Though that nearly didn’t happen either. “I applied for university but initially didn’t get into any,” admits Monk. “I remember going to an interview at Nottingham Trent and they asked me if I read a newspaper and whether I kept up with current a airs. It caught me o -guard and I just told them I liked colouring in. I should say, that’s not always my answer to everything, though it is going through my head quite a lot of the time.”

Just when he’d given up on the idea of university, a call from Leicester and the o er of a place saw him take up a graphic design course and, during the final semester of an advertising module, when he was “cobbling together some average work in my lunch hour”, he was approached by another guy from the course, someone he didn’t know, who asked him if he wanted to team up. “At what?” was Monk’s first response. That guy was Matt Waller, now creative director at Recipe. “Matt told me, on that first meeting,” says Monk, “that a friend of his had recently had a placement at a place called BBH and that he’d said it was brilliant, that they just sat around with their feet up or played pool all day. I said, ‘ok, sounds brilliant’.” He and Monk were a creative team from that point on, and for the next 17 years, and after putting their books together and “fannying about for a bit” they got a placement at DMB&B, which they loved.

When the placement finished they went back to college and after graduating, moved to London where, two years, a variety of “crap jobs” and a lot of hauling their portfolio around to agencies later, Monk managed to lose all their work by leaving it on a bus. “That was November ’98,” he says, “so there was nothing on computer, nothing saved, it was all electroset and photocopies. It was a nightmare, but it was a lesson in preciousness because we had to decide what we loved, what to rebuild and what we could do better.” They obviously made good decisions because the first place they took the new book to o ered them a placement, and 11 years later, they were still at BBH London. “It was brilliant,” says Monk. “We worked with amazing people; Nick Gill, Tony Davidson, Kim Papworth, Russell Ramsey, a real education. Matt and I started there as two people, as two young lads, and left there as nine. In that time we both met our partners and had five kids between us.”

Reaching for his trusty toolbox

At BBH, Monk and Waller were running accounts including The Mail on Sunday and Vodafone, but decided they wanted to try something di erent. “We just felt that you can’t be a fully-rounded creative if you’ve only experienced one place.” The pair landed next at Grey, an agency then not renowned for its great creative output, but they were enthused by then-ECD Nils Leonard’s vision of what Grey could become. “We were like, let’s just give it 18 months, see how it goes,” explains Monk. “Day one, we got in and were like, ‘what the fuck have we done?!’ It was just so di erent. BBH was a beautifully oiled machine and Grey was just a little bit maverick. But we looked at it and they had all the pieces. It was like they were all there, on the garage ﬂoor, they just needed putting together.”

So, Monk’s trusty toolbox came out again and he helped the agency to create some fantastic work for a range of clients; The British Heart Foundation, Lucozade and the mould-breaking Unquiet Film Series for

“Day one, we got in and were like, ‘what the fuck have we done?!’ It was just so different. BBH was a beautifully oiled machine and Grey was just a little bit maverick.”

“It got me thinking that awards inspire people, and yes, we look to them as a gauge, but they’re not what drive good creative people. [Those people] are after brilliant ideas, and if awards come then that’s great.”

Finding rewards without awards

After ﬁve years, promotion to deputy CD and amicably parting ways with Waller, Monk once again decided to move on to pastures new, this time to Publicis London, where in 2015, he was named the agency’s ECD. “[I moved] for exactly the same reasoning as before; to try something new,” he says. How was the step up from deputy CD to ECD? “I guess it’s just that the correlation between the amount of problems you have and the time you have to solve them changes,” he says. “As a creative you’ve got a couple of briefs. As a creative director you’ve got a couple of briefs and you’ve got to meet clients and have a series of meetings. As ECD you get everything.” He says that having more on his plate doesn’t stop him from being hands-on creatively – “that’s the best bit about the job” – but that there’s no instruction manual to moving up the creative career ladder, you just have to feel your way.

How did the announcement last June that Publicis was withdrawing from awards shows for 12 months go down with him, and with his sta ? Did it throw a spanner in the agency’s finely tuned creative works? “It was definitely a massive talking point,” he admits. “I heard [the announcement] and thought, ‘ok, I need to take a step back and ask what this means’. The first thing you think about is talent, how it’s going to a ect them? But most have been very chilled about it. It got me thinking that awards inspire people, and yes, we look to them as a gauge, but they’re not what drive good creative people. [Those people] are after brilliant ideas, and if awards come then that’s great. [Publicis creatives’] reaction was, ‘it’s ok, it’s cool, it’s not going to stop us trying to have the best ideas’.”

Monk says that the biggest surprise for him about that situation was that the clients themselves are so committed to creativity and want their campaigns to be recognised at awards shows, that they will o er to pay for entries if the agency won’t pay itself. “That was a revelation for me,” he says. “I thought then that the bar had shifted. If you can make work that the clients are so proud of that they want to enter it, that’s the gauge [of success].”

The Times and The Sunday Times. “They were good clients – the best,” says Monk of the News UK team. “They totally got creative ideas.” The Unquiet Film Series, from 2014, was a set of short documentary films that covered a variety of elements of the newspapers’ sta and output. The Art of Satire looked at the work of political cartoonist Peter Brookes, Bearing Witness covered the kidnapping and eventual return of foreign correspondent Anthony Loyd and photographer Jack Hill, Bringing the World to Britain documented foreign a airs correspondent Christina Lamb’s time in Afghanistan. In all there were 12 films, each taking a compelling look at the inner workings of a brand that was more than 200 years old. The campaign picked up a slew of awards – not least two Branded Content of the Year shots Awards over two consecutive years – and a mountain of critical acclaim. “It was a really massive job,” remembers Monk. “Just how do you sum up 230 years? But we landed on this idea of the ink on the paper. It’s quiet, but the stories it tells are noisy, they create noise around the world. There were so many stories to tell and how do you sum them up in a 60-second commercial that would probably have a 30-second cut-down? You can’t, so we decided on a series of films and when we sold that through [to the client], the journalists got involved. We had the archivist of The Times and Sunday Times, we had lawyers, the editors of the papers, the managing editor, then the talent. Pulling all that together and being part of that team was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was just fucking brilliant!”

Beer-calmed contention and a TV show tapestry

Another success has been Publicis’ work for Heineken. The campaign, Worlds Apart, was a social experiment whereby people with opposing views – about Brexit, sexuality, politics – were forced to meet and, possibly, share a beer. The ﬁlm has been watched nearly 15 million times on YouTube and struck a chord with consumers in what is currently a very divided UK. “People didn’t believe we’d done it for real,” says Monk, “didn’t believe that these were real people. But in terms of the casting process, it was really impressive. The casting director interviewed hundreds of people without telling them the idea and spoiling it. It’s all utterly genuine.”

Creating things is in Monk’s blood and spending time crafting something to be the best it can be excites him. Another Publicis client is Tourism Ireland and, for them, the agency created real, ornately carved, wooden doors for the award-winning Doors of Thrones tourist trail campaign, as well as a 77-metrelong tapestry illustrating key moments from Game of Thrones, which uses Northern Ireland as a key ﬁlming location There’s something inherently satisfying about making something physical, he says, before heading o to lend a hand in creating something else, physical or otherwise. “Craft is the thing that gets me going. I remember, as a kid, my uncle had a carpentry workshop. I’d go down on a Saturday and just smell the wood, watch him use the planes and the lathe. You know, making stu just really appeals.” S

“I remember going to an interview at Nottingham Trent and they asked me if I read a newspaper; whether I kept up with current a airs. It caught me o -guard and I just told them I liked ‘colouring in’.”

WHAT INSPIRES Dave Monk

What’s your favourite ever ad? The advertising answer is probably The Lego Movie, but in terms of classic ads, probably Cog; it’s perfect. I also love Puma White Paper from Droga5; just brilliant. And one that gets me every time is The Centaur for Honda Bikes. That end shot gets me right in the spine. I know that’s four, but there’s so many to choose from. What product could you not live without? Bricks.

What are your thoughts on social media? Mostly positive. The world has a voice in so many places it never had before. The algorithms need some serious looking at, but I love how a tweet from Barbara in Scunthorpe has a voice. Instagram is my social media of choice. Pure unabridged eye-ramblings. A hobby and a diary rolled into one.

How do you relieve stress during a pitch? Put pen to paper, and whenever possible try and make sure everyone sits down to eat at the same time. Which is often easier said than done.

What’s the last ﬁlm you watched and was it any good? The Post Largely overrated. Streep just about single-handedly wrestles it into shape and apart from a 15-minute section in the middle and a mesmerising sequence inside the printing warehouse, and some charming directorial salutes to the 60s, it could’ve been better given the incredible story.

What’s your favourite piece of tech? Bricks. Or the ISS (International Space Station).

What ﬁlm do you think everyone should have seen? Lars and the Real Girl.

What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to? The real girl.

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? Composer *laughs* – not really very good at playing anything, but sitting behind the keys is a happy place. Or a carpenter, probably in the reverse order. I’d build a studio of wood and ﬁll it with glockenspiels.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I was once in the British

Judo National Team Champion squad.

a visual HUNGER

Keeping up with Vicky Lawton’s to-do list reminds one of the old adage, ‘if you want something done ask a busy person’. The photographer is also a CD twice over for two Rankin ‘family’ concerns: his fashion/culture magazine Hunger and in-house agency The Full Service; and she has a growing career directing ads for such clients as Chanel and Bourjois. She grabs a minute to tell Selena Schleh about her ‘visual fanaticism’ and her insatiable appetite for new challenges

There’s a shoot about to start when shots arrives at Rankin’s studios in north London, and the air hums with a kind of nervous energy. Crew members with directional haircuts mill around; equipment is unloaded from vans; doors slam; models saunter in, all gangly limbs and dresseddown cool. Amidst the hubbub, Vicky Lawton is a reassuringly down-to-earth presence, cradling a steaming cup of tea; her only nod to fashion a pair of electric-blue ankle boots.

The director, creative and photographer is still buzzing from the excitement of being named Creative Circle’s Best New Female Commercials Director last year. She’s just directed a new spot for Mi Band – India’s answer to the FitBit, adding ﬁtness to her impressive reel of fashion and beauty campaigns, fashion ﬁlms and music videos. Turns out Lawton’s dynamic and glossy aesthetic – she describes herself as a ‘visual fanatic’ – is as much in demand by brands outside the fashion world as it is by the likes of Chanel, Bourjois and Agent Provocateur.

Something’s gotta give

As well as a burgeoning directing career, Lawton holds two creative directorships within the Rankin realm: his fashion and culture biannual magazine, Hunger, which she helped launch in 2011; and in-house creative agency, The Full Service, through which Lawton has pitched and produced campaigns for Belsta , Versace and French Connection, among others. Having also returned to photography for the ﬁrst time since her degree, how on earth is she keeping all the balls in the air? “Last year was my ‘can I do everything?’ year,” explains Lawton, “and the answer was, ‘no’. So I’ve stepped away from Hunger a little bit, into a more executive role… But there’s going to have to be another ‘Ok, what’s going to go?’ moment this year.” Whatever the outcome, she’s unlikely to stray too far from what she calls “the family business” – she’s currently repped by Rankin o shoots: The Graft, for directing, and Tonic Represents for photography, and has a decade-

long history with the man behind the empire, having started at the studio as a photography intern. Over the years, she says, Rankin has become a real mentor to her. “He’s basically been the person who’s said, ‘You can do this on your own’. He gave me the conﬁdence to really go for it [directing]. When I started getting into the commercials world, I’d be all, ‘er, I’m just about to do this kind of shoot, what do you reckon?’ and he’d just say, ‘Oh, you know what you’re doing’. And now, sometimes, we’re pitching on the same things, which is scary – but also amazing!” The student, it seems, is rapidly becoming the master.

“The brief was just three words – ‘pure, natural, energy,’ – so I just packed in as much as I could from my creative reference archive, all the stu I’d ever wanted to do. It was a visual feast!”

It’s a long way from her early days dabbling in directing. Armed with a Canon 7D DSLR –“the perfect tool to learn, very simply, about ﬁlm” –Lawton began teaching herself how to craft a story: “how do I take that person from A to B, how do I want to record that journey?” When her day job as a creative director took her onto ﬁlm shoots, she badgered the crew about the whys and wherefores of the equipment they were using, absorbing every last detail.

After picking up a handful of beauty ads, she landed a zingy launch campaign for New Zealand energy drink V Pure, which featured thundering horses, ﬁre, acrobats and exotic birds. “The brief

“I could light a car in the same way that I light a face. I’d love the challenge of doing a car commercial.”

“I don’t want us to stop making work that’s sexual, because we’ve fought so long to have the power and the chance to do something that is free.”

was just three words - ‘pure, natural, energy,” she remembers, “so I just packed in as much as I could from my creative reference archive, all the stu I’d ever wanted to do. It was a visual feast!”

Comfy in the uncomfortable zone

That extensive creative reference archive and fashion editorial heritage has clearly shaped Lawton’s directing style: her work is incredibly visual, full of montages and quick cuts, every shot packed full of colour and surprise, all overlaid with a glossy ﬁnish. And V Pure hasn’t been the only non-fashion brand to covet a fashion aesthetic in its advertising, as evidenced by the aforementioned “bonkers but brilliant” commercial for Mi Band, which took her out of the studio and into the sweltering slums of Mumbai. Running around rooftops in 90 per cent humidity, the monsoon due to arrive any day, made for a tough shoot, but Lawton loved every minute out on location. “[The client] was looking for that fashion/beauty edge, but in sport,” she explains, “which I found interesting as a lot of my work is action-y, but also quite polished, and I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to bring it all together. It was quite a challenge, seeing how that glossy approach to visuals would work on the streets.” And her style could translate into almost any context, reckons Lawton. “I could light a car in the same way that I light a face. I’d love the challenge of doing a car commercial.”

Being in such demand, it would be easy to stick with a tried-and-tested formula, but Lawton constantly challenges herself to push the boundaries. “I try and teach myself something on every job. What can I use on the next job that’s di erent to the last? Whether that’s new rigs, or a new camera and a lens which could be used in a di erent way. I ﬁnd that all really fascinating. What I want to do now is keep pushing the boundaries. I tell myself: I’ve done this before, so what’s going to make it that bit more uncomfortable?”

Outside of commercials, Lawton has continued

to pursue her love of fashion through films for the likes of Chanel, Elie Saab and Jil Sander. Here, too, she’s tried to push beyond the tropes of the genre. Fashion films are often criticised for taking themselves too seriously – not a charge that could be levelled at her 2015 e ort for Chanel’s K-Pop inspired 2016 Cruise Resort collection, which saw model Charlotte Free kick, punch, drop and roll through a video-game obstacle course, tongue firmly wedged in cheek.

Even Lawton’s more ‘classic’ fashion ﬁlms have an edge: in the darkly beautiful Point of View for Jil Sander, shifting walls and boxes echo the minimalist lines of a designer handbag but also create a creeping sense of claustrophobia. “It might be a beautiful image, but there’s still emotion there, there’s still something going on,” explains Lawton of her approach.

She’s particularly keen to embrace “a beginning, a middle and an end” in her work, and thinks that’s where the genre is headed – while still recognising there’s a place for what she calls “moving portraits”. “There’s merit to that if it’s done in a beautiful way – a still image is one moment and a fashion film is sometimes just a moving version of that. But I think it’s always nice to give something a reason. A journey. That would be a way for fashion film to really push it. People could definitely be more brave.”

Posh pants and pasta with sauce

What about fashion’s age-old reliance on ‘sex sells’? Lawson is no stranger to bottoms and boobs, having shot for luxury lingerie purveyors Agent Provocateur and erotica emporium Coco de Mer. The latter’s short ﬁlm, X (tagline: ‘They say you think about sex every six seconds. We can help you think about sex even more.’), collectively directed with Rankin and six other ﬁlmmakers, is an erotic jolt to the brain; two and a half minutes of aphrodisiac imagery, from the abstract to the eye-poppingly explicit. It won Lawton a Young Director Award in 2016. “I love

1/2/3 Coco de Mer, X

“What I want to do now is keep pushing the boundaries. I tell myself: I’ve done this before, so what’s going to make it that bit more uncomfortable?”

that kind of thing,” says Lawton cheerfully, “when myself and the model are on the same wavelength, and it’s a real collaboration.”

But does this sort of sexualised imagery still have a place in the post-Weinstein and #MeToo world? Lawton worries that if the pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction, it could be a retrograde step – creatively, artistically and yes, for gender equality. “I don’t want us to stop making work that’s sexual, because we’ve fought so long to have the power and the chance to do something that is free. I’m worried that we’re going to go back to not being able to express ourselves.”

The conversation segues onto model-slashactress Emily Ratajowski’s antics for LOVE magazine’s advent calendar, where the selfprofessed feminist was ﬁlmed writhing around in spaghetti and mocked for declaring the shoot

WHAT INSPIRES

Vicky Lawton

What’s your favourite ever ad? That would have to be a tie between My Mutant Brain, the Kenzo World fragrance ad by Spike Jonze and Levi’s Odyssey directed by Jonathan Glazer.

What product could you not live without? I got a Kindle for my birthday and it’s my new best friend.

What do you think of social media? It’s an addiction!

How do you relieve stress during a shoot? I drink Diet Coke and eat crisps.

What’s the last ﬁlm you watched and was it any good? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri –it blew my mind.

What’s your favourite piece of tech? Not necessarily tech, but the body rigs we created for the Sweat Story ﬁlm I shot in Mumbai were fantastic. And an eye opener into what the possibilities are.

What ﬁlm do you think everyone should have seen? It’s a Wonderful Life, at the Hebden Bridge Picturehouse.

What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to? Tina or Gene, sometimes Louise, from [animated US sitcom] Bob’s Burgers

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? A stunt woman. I don’t have the ﬁtness skills, or mental strength but I think it would be so awesome to drive a car really fast then do a roly-poly out of it, jump off a bridge and land on a lorry.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I have a big collection of hats.

‘empowering’. “I think people just need to be more accepting of [that fact] this is a woman who is really conﬁdent with her body – this is almost her form of art and a way to express herself,” reckons Lawton. “I think she’s awesome to get up and do that. It’s completely unapologetic.” For Lawton, the female form is a beautiful thing, and if a woman is “happy and comfortable and enjoying the moment” in front of the camera, then why the hell not? In fact, something Lawton has been “dying to get round to” is a nudes photography series. “I want to do something I haven’t done since uni. Something completely unﬁltered. Someone in their rawest form.”

With all these boundary-pushing projects in her sights, something tells us this creative polymath is going to ﬁnd her ‘something’s got to go’ moment particularly tough this year.

“At

Diesel, we are ‘inside the border’, but with a touch of something different.’’

PERFECTLY IMPERFECT

Renzo Rosso

“The greatness of Diesel is in its ability to inspire people, to give them a new angle.”

With ads featuring gay kisses and racially segregated swimming pools, Diesel was making a splash way back in the 90s. But after 20 years of award-winning creativity, it begun to lose its edge. Founder Renzo Rosso, and Bruno Bertelli, CEO of the brand’s new marketing agency, Publicis Italy, tell Kate Hollowood about returning Diesel to its roots by celebrating ﬂaws

Bruno Bertelli

Renowned for being direct, visionary and often outrageous, Diesel founder Renzo Rosso embodies all that the brand stands for. While far from being an outsider – he hangs with celebrity pals such as Kanye West – the un-pretentious Italian billionaire stands out among the fashion elite. “At Diesel, we’re ‘inside the border’, but with a touch of something di erent,’’ he says.

In the small Italian town of Molvena in 1978, Rosso created the Diesel brand with clothing manufacturer Adriano Goldschmied, who he then bought out in 1985. Rosso’s vision for ‘distressed’ denim – jeans that looked like they’d been worn-in – helped it stand out from rival denim companies such as Levi’s. Rosso was so focussed on perfecting his product, that he didn’t set about advertising his merchandise until 1991, when he decided it was time to amplify the brand.

He began by tearing out hundreds of fashion ads from magazines. “I put them around my o ce, on the walls and ﬂoor,” he remembers. “It was very easy to understand who I wanted to be, because all the advertising was very similar.” He remembers how every ad (most of them in black and white) was product focussed. “I thought, ‘What’s the most important thing in advertising? It is to have a conversation with the consumer’,” he says. From that moment on, Diesel’s advertising would be all about the message.

Working with creative director Jocke Jonason at Swedish agency Paradiset, Rosso launched Diesel’s For Successful Living campaign. Designed to make people think – and separate those who ‘get it’, from those who never will – the brand’s long-running campaign saw ads that were deeply

ironic and fun yet made quite profound statements about modern society. Among the 90s print ads, a black man dives into an ‘all whites’ pool, two sailors share a romantic kiss and text (ironically) urges parents to teach their children how to kill. Soon after the campaign launched, where a single creative execution ran in every market, the brand had a global tribe of supporters.

Diesel campaigns won several Grands Prix at Cannes Lions throughout the decade and it was named Advertiser of the Year at the festival in 1998 (during the prize-giving ceremony, Rosso and four of his team famously went on stage to collect the award wearing masks of his own face). “Diesel started this revolution,” says Rosso. “We started it to change the world of communications because our advertising was about interacting with our consumer and awaking in them a curiosity.”

A return to purpose

However, after Rosso left running the brand to focus on acquiring other companies (his holding company OTB, which stands for Only The Brave, also owns Viktor & Rolf, Maison Margiela, Marni and others), Diesel’s ads started to lose some of their magic. “The advertising became more obvious. No less beautiful, but more obvious,” says the founder. “The irony wasn’t there, nor the passion and love that used to be there before.” Rosso decided to return his focus to Diesel and, just as before, initially poured his e orts into the products (he says he’s started wearing them again for the ﬁrst time in years). He then hired a new marketing director, Dario Gargiulo, who in August 2017 moved the account from Anomaly

“…the restaurant where the couple dine also has a website encouraging people to make spectacularly ﬂawed culinary choices. Video recipes explain how to create ‘fuel for the

such as a Bloody Mary garnished with baconwrapped

Amsterdam and brought Publicis Italy onboard.

The new team sought to revive the anarchic energy and meaningful messaging that Diesel had once stood for. “The For Successful Living idea was still there,” says Bruno Bertelli, CEO Publicis Italy, “our objective was to bring it back and make it relevant again.” The team didn’t want to stray too far from the fashion world, but felt it had to o er a di erent perspective and redeﬁne its purpose as a brand. “I think the greatness of Diesel is its ability to inspire people, to give them a new angle.”

“If you look at fashion, a lot of brands claim [to be about o ering] freedom, but at the end of the day, they always direct you to the same territory, which is perfection,” Bertelli continues. “Also, on social media, we only show the perfect side of us. It’s always the best food, the best vacation or the best friends.” Rosso agrees, “Social networks are after beauty, beauty, beauty. I think if you [present] reality, you gain more sympathy and more respect.” So Diesel got real, and instead of joining the hordes of fashion brands promoting ideal bodies and lifestyles, it began celebrating imperfection.

Diesel gets its mojo back

The brand’s new positioning launched with a stirring film set to Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien and featuring a group of models each with a distinct defect. A uni-browed beauty seduces her love interest, a girl with a squint pockets two snooker balls and a denim-clad hipster hisses at airport security with a mouth full of braces. While each star of the video has undeniable sass, they also have an endearing vulnerability about them, helping to create a sense of warmth that is rare in fashion films and enables the viewer to feel empathy with the models. “The casting brief was models with flaws who also have the ability to create closeness,” says Bertelli. “Sometimes, [in aspiring to] perfection – you create a distance.”

Bertelli wanted Go with the Flaw to feel more like a music video – because, he says, “millennials

“The casting brief was models with ﬂaws who also have the ability to create closeness. Sometimes [in aspiring to] perfection – you create a distance.”

website encouraging people to make spectacularly ﬂawed culinary choices. Video recipes, created with Buzzfeed’s food platform Tasty, explain how to create ‘fuel for the ﬂawed’ such as a Bloody Mary garnished with bacon-wrapped onion rings.

Diesel reinforced its new message at New York Fashion Week, when it opened a pop-up store appearing to sell counterfeit garments branded ‘Deisel’. The products were actually limited edition, authentic Diesel and shoppers that were happy to ‘Go with the Flaw’ got to buy the high-quality goods at market-stall prices.

The ﬂair of a founder Rosso’s brand may appear to champion imperfections in the world, but he’s not so forgiving when it comes to the creative process. “I am one of those people who is never satisﬁed, because I am looking for perfection,” he says. “I tell my team that creativity is the most important thing. I’m always saying, ‘go crazy, do more!’.”

WHAT INSPIRES…

Bruno Bertelli & Renzo Rosso

What’s your favourite ever ad?

BB Axe Astronaut and Nike Fate

RR The next one.

What product could you not live without?

BB My phone.

RR Denim.

What do you think of social media?

BB It’s great, but I don’t believe in over-revealing. Keep some mystery!

RR It is key and I use it a lot. But let’s not forget to speak to each other.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot?

BB If possible, I play basketball.

What’s the last ﬁlm you watched and was it any good?

BB Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Fantastic.

hate advertising” – so François Rousselet, the talent behind promos for Madonna and The Rolling Stones, directed the spot. “It’s shot very classically with some references from the past,” says Bertelli. “It could be a video from the 80s.” Rousselet also directed the second iteration of the brand’s new positioning. “The first chapter was about establishing a manifesto for the brand,” says Bertelli. “So we decided to tell a story for the second one.” Keep the World Flawed shows a young man with huge ears having them surgically pinned back. He goes on to meet a beautiful woman in a laundrette and the pair fall madly in love. It is then revealed that she has also had plastic surgery, in her case to reshape a naturally prominent nose. The film ends with the pair walking hand in hand with their child, who has of course inherited both of their unwanted features. ‘Flaws Always Win’, reads the endline. “We wanted to bring in the humour and irony that has always been part of Diesel,” says Bertelli. The story is enriched with Easter eggs hidden throughout the film that direct viewers to more content that helps reinforce Diesel as a lifestyle brand. For example, the restaurant where the couple dine also has a

It is unusual for the founder of a company to remain so involved with the brand’s communications, and his proximity to the work keeps the direction laser-focussed and true to Diesel. “It was beautiful to have a conversation with Renzo about his views on the brand,” says Bertelli. “When I started working on it, I was drawn towards more controversial, rebel territory, but instead, we decided to ﬁnd an angle that was more inspiring. What’s surprising, is that while many clients spend hours discussing ideas, with Renzo the decision is immediate. He has an artistic instinct. He goes for the one he likes, and then he lets us produce it.”

Rosso concurs that he is instinctual; “I immediately approved Go With the Flaw because it was very brave and true to the Diesel DNA.” He describes how many of his friends have congratulated him on the strength of the new work but insists he doesn’t want to take the credit. “We have a good team,” he says.

Rosso believes Diesel owes its success chieﬂy to creativity – an essential ingredient for any business to thrive. ‘Without creativity, you face more competiton and have to make your prices cheaper and cheaper. If you have it, you can build a brand, even a lifestyle. You can build values.”

RR A Casa Tutti Bene, a new movie by my friend Gabriele Muccino.

What’s your favourite piece of tech?

BB My phone.

RR My smartphone and matching Diesel On smartwatch.

What ﬁlm do you think everyone should have seen?

BB The Party with Peter Sellers.

RR Point Break or The Last of the Mohicans.

What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to?

BB J.K. Simmons’ character in Whiplash

RR Russell Crowe’s character in Gladiator

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be?

BB A ﬁlmmaker.

RR A soccer player.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know…

BB I once played football with Oasis.

RR I wake up every morning at 5.55am (ﬁve is my lucky number).

Timelessness is so last year

“For luxury brands, it’s essential to decide what your cultural footprint should be, to shape and to sculpt it. People are demanding that brands have a point of view on society and act on it.”

Luxury brands have long aimed to present themselves as enduring classics, but has the notion of timelessness had its time? wonders Brune Buonomano, managing director of BETC Luxe. Maybe, brands need now to be more timely; to take a responsible stance on current issues and reflect, even affect, the culture of the day

For years, we’ve been looking to build timeless brands: convinced that luxury is deﬁned by its capacity to withstand time. We read everywhere that luxury is found in what’s expensive, what shines, what gives a social status. But what if all of these principles are now outdated? Past their prime? And that today, the most accurate deﬁnition of luxury or, at least, a more interesting way of looking at luxury, is to consider that it is the opposite of timelessness. That the most powerful luxury brands are those which embody their era, their communities, their culture. Let’s call it the cultural footprint. It’s almost as if we applied the logic of the carbon footprint to brands and what surrounds them. In effect, the cultural footprint becomes the positive or negative impact that a brand has on its cultural environment. Which is something pretty extraordinary when you think about it. It is almost like the trail of a scent, like the trace you leave behind in a room. In the same way, a brand leaves a trace in its era, beyond its economic achievements and beyond the nature of its products or services. That’s true of every impactful brand, but particularly for luxury industries.

Nobody is absolutely beautiful

As soon as we acknowledge that the most inﬂuential brands of our time have a cultural footprint, it becomes clear that it is as much a challenge as an opportunity. If they don’t master or control this cultural footprint, it can be devastating. Promoting a single vision of beauty around the world, forgetting about the plural and, ultimately, favouring one deﬁnition of femininity over another, is a very dangerous thing. Take the shift that took place in the 80s, when many brands portrayed glamour in a very restrictive manner. They came to appreciate that there was an issue of cultural impact, beyond the obvious business factors, if they kept on promoting this ‘absolute’ version of beauty. L’Oréal led the

way by switching its famous line from, “Because I’m worth it”, to “Because we’re worth it,” allowing for a more realistic representation of beauty. So what does that mean in practice? For luxury brands, it’s essential to decide what your cultural footprint should be, to shape and to sculpt it. People are demanding that brands have a point of view on society and that they act on it. Some brands, like the French luxury conglomerate LVMH, understood this early on, launching its Les Journées Particulières in 2013 – they’re now held every two years – in which its ateliers and production sites hold open days for the general public. Two years later, Prada made its entire digital archive – 28 years’ worth of collections – available to everyone by uploading it online. More recently, with our ‘Soft is the new strong’ campaign for Eric Bompard, BETC Luxe established the cashmere brand as the ambassador of ‘soft power’ at a time when society needs it most.

Fashioning the right cultural footprint

In a way, the cultural footprint generates a cultural duty. When you reach a certain level of power and exposure as a brand, you owe it to yourself to give back to your era. And building a brand’s cultural footprint can be done in many ways. It’s about supporting new generations of artists, designers, and taking risks, making bold choices when it comes to the people you promote or those you collaborate with. Because it goes beyond patronage, it impacts on every level of your production or creative process. As a creative agency, we’ve taken this to heart, working with music video directors like Colin Tilley or up-and-coming music artists like Thomas Azier for Yves Saint Laurent Beauté.

But the cultural footprint can also be about making statements on art, on diversity, on equality. Ultimately, it’s about taking responsibility for your cultural duty as a brand. S

working in WONDERLAND

The worlds she creates are fantastical ﬂights of fancy – think wallclimbing cabs and freshly baked biplanes – and she’s worked for the loftiest of fashion brands, from Valentino to Prada, yet there is still something nicely down-to-earth about set designer Shona Heath. She tells Selena Schleh about joyous quests for ‘sticky foam’ and plasterboard and how to make things last in today’s culture of throw-away images

Shona Heath’s whimsical, magical worlds have graced the glossy pages of fashion bibles Vogue, W Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and LOVE, and ﬁlled the windows of world-famous stores, from Harrods to H&M. She’s the fashion industry’s go-to set designer – and yet, you’ve probably never heard her name. While the spotlight shines on her collaborators – creative luminaries, such as photographer Tim Walker and stylist (and new British Vogue editor) Edward Enninful, Heath works quietly in the shadows. And that’s exactly how it suits her.

“If you’d asked me ten years ago [if set designers get the recognition they deserve], I’d have said no,” Heath muses over the phone from her Shoreditch studio. “But now I feel like I’m really lucky to be doing a creative job that I love, and if you want to be shouted about you have to change your role slightly, and it gets more into art direction. That’s still creative, but I don’t want to be stood behind a computer editing pictures. I like the hands-on crafting and physicality of my job.”

Magical trees and melting Perspex Heath’s love of handicrafts started from a young age, thanks to her creative mother. “I’d watch her making clothes and hats and stained glass windows, and think I could do anything she could. Sew, glue, build, paint the sitting room…” After studying fashion and print design at Brighton University, she started designing costumes for music videos. Unaware that there was such a job as ‘set designer’, she fell into it by accident in 2001, helping out her friend Cathy Edwards, then-fashion editor of Dazed & Confused, on a shoot by creating a set made entirely out of paper. “I put my phone number at the bottom of the page, and the calls just started coming in – it sort of snowballed from there.”

Paper is just one of the materials Heath fashions into fantastical scenes for her luxury brand clients; in her deft hands, fibreglass could be transformed into a fleet of ornate black cabs driving up the side of J. Crew’s London flagship store; or polystyrene into a baguette bi-plane for Hermès’ 2009 campaign (the wheels themselves were made from actual bread – baked to order in a Paris boulangerie). There’s a whi of mad scientist – or meth lab cook – in her methods for creating such visual wonders as iridescent ‘nightblooming’ flowers, a window display for McQueen Parfum at Harrods. “I wanted to make it all in wax, but the fire retardancy criteria at Harrods is so outrageous you can’t use glue, or any solventbased paints, and you can’t use power tools in the window to put things together,” remembers Heath, “so we ended up cooking up Perspex in mini-

ovens and melting it to make it looks like wax.”

‘Elf ‘n’ safety hurdles aside, Heath ﬁnds shop windows the most challenging environment to design for: both in terms of the scale – “because you’ve always got a mannequin in there, and that puts an inanimate object you wouldn’t choose into your world” – and because, unlike fashion editorials and ad campaigns, there’s no ﬁlter. “You can put the things I make in front of the camera and once they’re photographed they look like magical, otherworldly things, whereas in a shop window it’s very di erent. I’m always trying to make sure the magic is there, so that people looking in are thinking: ‘how, why, what?’.”

When it comes to achieving the ‘how’ on large-scale installations, such as the magical tree which spread its glittering, votive-bedecked branches over the front row for Dior’s 2017 spring couture show, Heath turns to London set builders Andy Knight. With 30 years’ experience, they’re well-tuned to her surreal aesthetic and the

“You can put the things I make in front of the camera and once they’re photographed they look like magical, otherworldly things…”

structural challenges that come with her predilection for “ﬁne lines” (“I’m always asking them to make things thinner”), plus, they act as a useful check-and-balance on Heath’s wilder ideas. “I’ll want a twelve-foot wall of glass, and they’ll say, well, that’s going to fall over, unless you have panels; and do you want them every four foot, or every three foot? You reassess the design to answer the structural problems.”

At the other end of the spectrum is a world in miniature, complete with tiny gardens, hidden inside a 17th-century casket – an embroidered

“I feel like I’m really lucky to be doing a creative job that I love… I like the hands-on crafting and physicality of my job.”

time trying to explain to someone what you’re going to do. I don’t need to prove to Tim that what I do is going to work – I just need to do it.”

The pair recently teamed up on Pirelli’s 2018 Alice in Wonderland-themed calendar, featuring an all-black cast including Whoopi Goldberg as the Duchess and Naomi Campbell and Sean (P Diddy) Coombs as the axe-wielding Beheaders. The result is vintage Heath-and-Walker: all warped perspectives, walls tilting at alarming angles, a chaotic dreamscape littered with outsized playing cards and spindly gothic trees. In a recreation of the famous ‘drink me’ scene, the giant Alice, played by Sudanese-Australian model Duckie Thot, sprawls on the ﬂoor of a doll’s house, her pu y blue dress rucked up around Amazonian thighs, cartoonishly huge platform shoes resting on the ceiling. Bringing a fresh twist to a classic tale that’s already been reimagined numerous times, was “quite a challenge” remembers Heath. “[I asked myself], ‘how do I make this picture not look like it’s been done a million times?’ How do I make Alice’s dress not look like Alice’s dress? I found it di cult, but I enjoyed it because it felt like it had meaning, and that we were making some good comments and progressing something within the industry that needed progressing.”

Pirelli came o the back of another Walker shoot that challenged fashion’s status quo, this time by casting unusual beauties – models with alopecia and the genetic disorder ectodermal

box where girls would secrete love-notes and keepsakes – which Heath and her team are painstakingly building in her Shoreditch studio for an exhibition at London’s V&A museum.

Expanding Alice and twisting Bosch

Where does she get her inspiration from? The “sinister staging” of Powell and Pressburger’s silver-screen classics, such as Black Narcissus, are “a big inﬂuence” – but mainly, it’s raw materials. On trips abroad, Heath makes a beeline for hardware stores where she ogles plasterboard and Plexiglas: “Like a seamstress would look at buttons and ribbons, I look at my craft. It’s just a bit bigger and more industrial.” She has a passion for “weird fabric shops, not luxury ones, the kind you see in Shepherds Bush, selling end-of-the-line

upholstery”, and is fascinated by colour and pattern on a large scale. The internet, too, is a rich source of references. “I’m always Googling things like ‘sticky black foam’ and the most random and wrong things come up.”

Someone who shares Heath’s interest in the surreal and the fantastical is her long-term collaborator, photographer Tim Walker – the pair have worked together for the best part of 18 years, and produced some of fashion’s most iconic images. “He’s a very nice man,” she deadpans when asked about their relationship, adding, “we’re very lucky to share a complete library of references. We both have a love for nature and storytelling, fantasy and surrealism.” That long history of collaboration has produced a kind of creative shorthand. “Normally you waste a lot of

“How do I make Alice’s dress not look like Alice’s dress? I found it di cult, but I enjoyed it because it felt like it had meaning, and that we were making some good comments and progressing something within the industry that needed progressing.”

dysplasia. The editorial, published in LOVE magazine and recently exhibited at Netherlands museum Noordbrabants, came about when art collector Nicola Erni commissioned Walker to do a shoot on any subject – he chose a twisted tribute to Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. “The deﬁnition of beauty was deﬁnitely pushed from the idea of a tall, skinny, beautiful thing,” says Heath, “[the models were] di erent shapes, sizes, colours, but still otherworldly.”

Projects such as these, which initiate debates and “are making cultural steps forward, even if

1/Harper’s Bazaar editorial, photographer Tim Walker

2 Pirelli 2018 Calendar, photographer Tim Walker

they’re tiny” have a longevity to them that Heath sees as a welcome riposte to the increasingly throwaway nature of image-making. She references not just the “millions” of sets which she has built, only to be trashed “because the photographer doesn’t like it, or it doesn’t go with the clothes” but the photographs themselves, which are becoming “smaller and more swipeable, almost reduced to stamp size.” She’s also witnessed ﬁrst-hand how the insatiable demand for content has led to a watering-down of creativity as well as budgets. “There used to be, say, six deﬁnitive Prada images that were shot, and they were the be-all and end-all of the season. Now, that’s not enough with all the platforms you need to put it on. You need to produce more like 500 images. So there’s not as much energy going into [making] an interesting creative image, which is possibly why things have got a bit safer.”

Seeking stories in Sanderson ﬂora

As a result, Heath ﬁnds herself increasingly drawn to live and larger-scale projects. Set design for theatre or ballet are two avenues she’d like to explore, “if the right project came along”. And she’s already dipped a toe into the world of movement and choreography; last year, she and her husband, photographer Tim Gutt, embarked on a “purely personal project, free from advertising constraints, art directors, stylists” where they took “a bunch of people and some clothes to a crazy place we found, friends cooked on a camp stove, we took some crazy pictures and

WHAT INSPIRES Shona Heath

What’s your favourite ever ad?

The Subjective Reality campaign for Miu Miu’s fall/winter 2015 collection, shot by Steven Meisel. I really believed this one.

What product could you not live without? Nivea moisturiser.

What are your thoughts on social media? I want to be able to be positive about it… but I’m still waiting.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot? Laugh a lot and never sit down.

What’s the last ﬁlm you watched and was it any good? Jumanji 2… Hilarious.

1/Check-mate, model Edie Campbell photographed by Tim Walker, for Vogue Italia, 2015

2 High-Style, Malgosia Bela, photographed by Tim Walker, for Vogue Italia, 2010

What’s your favourite piece of tech? My iPhone. I love the camera and its accessibility. It is a notebook for me.

What ﬁlm do you think everyone should have seen? Little Miss Sunshine.

What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to?

I don’t really relate to anyone female, but I like Danny, The Champion of the World’’s dad. Actually, I think he might be real…

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be?

A full time, amazing, ﬁve-star mum.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I have one really long toe (apparently so did Cleopatra!)

“There’s something about the storytelling in the ﬂoral patterns that I’m mesmerised by. I would love to use them in a very surprising and interpretative way.”

produced an enormous body of work”, publishing the results in a co ee table book, We Went and We Were. Using people in the same way as props in a set was “fascinating, and comes with an element of danger, failure and lack of control, which I love.”

Having already worked with a roll-call of top fashion brands, what would be her dream commission? Heath rather surprisingly cites an old English fabric company, Sanderson, which she remembers her mum buying o cuts from. “There’s something about the storytelling in the ﬂoral patterns that I’m mesmerised by. I would love to use them in a very surprising and interpretative way.” Long may Heath continue to construct her weird and wonderful worlds.

a sense of THEATRE

Along with a wealth of experience as a photographer and ﬁlmmaker for brands from Prada to Uniqlo, Autumn de Wilde has worn enough hats to confuse a milliner – having also been a dancer, model, author and actor. While her theatre training enriches her directing skills, as Iain Blair discovers, her stunning visual style feeds on many sources, including her own dreams; a place where the illogical is never questioned

It’s easy to see why top fashion houses like Prada, iconic brands like Uniqlo and Keds, and luxe hotels, such as the Venetian in Las Vegas, turn to acclaimed filmmaker and photographer Autumn de Wilde when they need witty, colourful and inspired campaigns. With a flair for combining the playful with the dramatic, and with an innate gift for capturing the everchanging cultural zeitgeist, whether through her commercials, music videos, books, portraits or films, de Wilde blends the line between art

and advertising with her unique contemporary style and polished commercial approach. “I really like to play in heightened reality, but with extreme sincerity,” she says of her style.

That approach is perfectly illustrated by her work for Prada. Last year she created The Postman Dreams 2, a series of four short films, written and directed by de Wilde, which was the sequel to her first project with Prada, a five-film series that debuted in 2015, was featured in Vogue and picked up a slew of gongs, including Visual Style winner at the 2016 AICP Awards and silver for Production and Post Production at the 2015 London International Awards.

“I was a photographer for many years… then I got into directing, and [now] both are my passion and obsession, so I feel my work has all these di erent veins and muscles.”

The sequel features A-list Hollywood talent – Elijah Wood portrays the Postman and Emma Roberts is the heroine, playing herself in the opening mini-ﬁlm The Bogey – but the real star of the surreal, very tongue-in-cheek series is the Prada Galleria bag, a key plot driver in each ﬁlm and an intense object of desire.

De Wilde’s quirky, dance-heavy Uniqlo Move campaign won multiple gold, silver and bronze awards at last year’s British Arrows and at the Ciclope Festival. And for the Venetian Hotel’s Orologio spot, she created an energetic, retro-fresh commercial featuring ﬁve dogs, countless cuckoo clocks, and an arresting colour palette of vibrant stripes and saturated tones.

“I’m very collaborative, even if things end up being recognisably mine, and I try to create things that people want to watch more than once, which

is why colour and a sense of heightened reality are so important to me,” she explains. “I was a photographer for many years, and still am, and then I got into directing, and both are my passion and obsession, so I feel my work has all these di erent veins and muscles. And some muscles get stronger while others don’t get used as much, and then that changes. I go through stages of exploring something to its fullest, and then move on.”

One constant in her work is the inﬂuence of dreams. “There’s no logic, but you don’t question it, whereas when you’re awake you’re questioning everything,” she notes. “So, when I mix reality and surrealism, my characters don’t question things, however bizarre the situation, and I think life is truly bizarre and colourful.”

As de Wilde points out, growing up in LA “was bizarre enough. There’s no loyalty to history, so you’d pass a house from the 20s, and right next door there’d be something from the 50s and then the 80s, so it feels like a collage city. And then they’ve made so many movies here, you’d see something and immediately go, ‘I know exactly where they shot that. I know that building’.”

Dancing through the creative arts

Having a father who was a professional photographer – “my brother and I lived at his studio for a while when I was very young” – meant that visual media “was always really interesting to me, especially as the [pop] artist Ed Ruscha lived very close by and there was this great enclave of interesting creative people around there who all inﬂuenced me, although I actually wanted to be a ballet dancer, and studied dance,” she reports. But her impressive height – she’s 6ft 2in – gradually became a problem in the dance world, and for “a tiny bit” she became a model – “but I didn’t like it.” Ultimately, she ended up in theatre school in LA, where she studied every kind of classical and modern acting technique. “It was sort of like RADA. I was sad about not being able to pursue dance, but then I also love theatre and it was a such a great toolkit to have, and I probably ﬁrst got the directing bug then. The acting was so helpful later on in dealing with actors and directing them, as I really understood their process.”

“There’s no logic [in dreams], but you don’t question it, whereas when you’re awake you’re questioning everything.”

Ironically, de Wilde “did not enjoy the company of actors back then,” and far preferred hanging out with musicians. “So I became a rock star photographer in the mid-90s, and I still do that along with everything else,” she adds. Her photographs of such stars as Beck, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jenny Lewis, The White Stripes, Fiona Apple, Elliott Smith, Norah Jones, Sonic Youth, Wilco and many others have appeared as album covers and editorial spreads, and she’s also written several music books: Elliott Smith, an in-depth look at the late artist through photographs and recorded conversations; Under Great White Northern Lights, which documents the White Stripes on the road

“…I was trying to create a visual language for them, and trying to help build stories for them where they could either hide behind it or reveal themselves through it.”

during their Canadian tour in the summer of 2007; and Beck, a chronicle of her 15-year friendship and creative partnership with musician Beck Hansen. “Part of the photography thing with all the musicians was that I was trying to create a visual language for them, and trying to help build stories for them where they could either hide behind it or reveal themselves through it,” she explains. “It’s all marketing, but it is creative marketing.”

Her stills work with the artists gradually led to directing music videos for such bands as The Raconteurs, Spoon, Jenny and Johnny, and Death Cab for Cutie, and that in turn led to directing commercials. “At the time, the record industry was basically collapsing, and I was looking around for other avenues, as I was signed to an agency but not getting any work,” she recalls. “And my big break was when Mark Romanek, who I’d known for years, and who was always very supportive of my

WHAT INSPIRES Autumn de Wilde

photography, took me over to Anonymous Content and got me set up there. And I immediately felt that they got me, and a plan was forged, but it took a while to really get established in commercials.”

She admits that “being a female photographer and commercials director in a male-dominated industry” is far from easy, “You have to continually prove yourself, but I worked hard and it gradually all came together.”

De Wilde got another big break when she landed the ﬁrst Prada campaign. “It was a game changer for me, as it really showcased what I could do,” she says. “They essentially gave me a blank sheet of paper and so much freedom to design the whole world for them. And everything then developed from that and gave people conﬁdence that I could handle big campaigns.” It was also a logical step for the artist, as her photography has long graced the covers of such fashion and lifestyle magazines as BlackBook, Flare, PAPER, New York magazine, Stylist, FILTER and L’O ciel For years, she has also documented the couture design team behind fashion brand Rodarte.

Goodbye Felix, hello future feature

De Wilde, who’s written, directed, and shot brand films for Oliver Peoples entitled Catch a Tuesday, starring Zooey Deschanel, and The Children Are Bored on Sundays, with Elijah Wood and Shirley Manson, was all set to make her feature film directorial debut with Goodbye, Felix Chester, a YA dramedy produced by Anonymous Content, until the financing fell apart at the last minute. “I’m told it happens to even the biggest directors,” she adds, “so I feel like I’ve graduated now.” S

1 Prada, The Bogey, from The Postman Dreams 2

2 Oliver Peoples, The Children Are Bored On Sundays

3 Oliver Peoples, Catch A Tuesday

4 Venetian Hotel, Orologio

5 Uniqlo, Move

What’s your favourite ever campaign/ad/fashion ﬁlm? Every fake photo shoot in The Eyes of Laura Mars. What product could you not live without? Kodak ﬁlm.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot? I don’t really feel that stress creates an interference for me creatively – I might actually get high on roadblocks.

What’s the last ﬁlm you watched and was it any good? The Great Beauty, for the hundredth time, which I believe implies that I’m a fan.

What’s your favourite piece of tech? The new Redback lights by Hudson Spider. (Instagram: @hudson.spider) What ﬁlm do you think everyone should have seen? Harold and Maude What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to? The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be?

I’m doing my dream job. Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I was in a Tom Petty video.

When feminism is so last season

What will become of feminism in fashion, if and when the #MeToo hashtags stop trending? wonders Milla McPhee, strategy director at adam&eveDDB. Can the T-shirt slogans of female empowerment move on from being mere memes à la mode, to a system of values that’s embedded more deeply in the industry?

There was a time when feminism and fashion were at odds. When the ‘F-word’ was more likely to evoke an image of a hairy-legged man-hater than the runways of New York Fashion Week.

It was 2013 when one of the red carpet’s favourite designers, Prabal Gurung, observed that “there has always been a strange sort of antagonism between fashion and powerful women, a belief that women must sacriﬁce femininity to gain power, authority and respect.” A troubling truth, for an industry so intrinsically connected with deﬁning the aspirations, values and desires of both men and women. But as the world confronts new realities in Washington, revelations in Hollywood and changing tides almost everywhere else – the leaders of the fashion world have changed tack.

A feminist makeover

The fashion industry has given feminism a makeover. The two are no longer at odds, they are complementary. Like a brand re-launch, feminism is now on trend. In 2017, the runways saw Dior’s now infamous ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ T-shirt, Angela Missoni’s take on the pink pussyhats and Mara Hoffman opening her show with the founders of the Women’s March. Prabal Gurung also launched the iconic ‘The Future is Female’ and ‘Nevertheless, She Persisted’ tees, with the latter evolving to an internet meme. Not to mention Saint Laurent and Balmain both ‘freeing the nipple’.

There’s no denying that feminism is hot right now. Fashion has been politicised and it has already trickled down from the high-end designers to the high street and the likes of Topshop and Zara. No wonder Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once, was quoted in a recent interview with The Hufﬁngton Post as saying: “Feminism is now considered very cool – it’s an aesthetic, it’s something that celebrities embrace, it’s something mainstream media uses as a hook to get people interested.” And to be fair, it’s not just the fashion industry on the feminist bandwagon. Everything from laundry detergent, cars, and paper towel brands are on board, too.

However, unlike Zeisler, I’m not cynical about what she discredits as “marketplace feminism, [which] involves picking and choosing and taking on the parts of the ideology or practice that appeal to you

and then ignoring those that don’t.” Anything that familiarises and popularises the movement has to be a good thing, even if it comes with a side of sales.

What comes in, must go out

But, in fashion, what comes in, must go out. According to Missoni, “pink is the new black”, but what happens when it’s replaced by yellow?

When feminism is a mere fashion accessory, does it ultimately risk becoming ‘so last season’? Vogue writer Eviana Hartman has already reported industry colleagues rolling their eyes over political fashion. “I’m so over it!” they scoff. So when the hashtag stops trending, how do we make sure that feminism is not just diminished as faddish fashion, but here to stay as evergreen style?

Tacit feminism

One answer could be that perhaps the future of feminism in fashion is that it no longer needs be so explicit. Maybe we won’t always need to wear our feminist ideals on our (literal) sleeves.

Feminist ideals could progress to be more implicit, embedded in the stories and aesthetic of the fashion world. In place of overt slogans, we can use symbolism and simply approach fashion with a feminist value system. For example,Vogue fashion editor Lynn Yaeger, while not being the type to burn her bra, has vowed to “channel strength, resistance and positive energy by wearing offbeat bright colours, bold prints, and my grandmother’s gold necklace.”

And after all, shouldn’t feminism be less about what models are wearing, as much as who they are, their attitude, beliefs and what they’re doing? Which is not to say they can’t be sexy, soft or feminine –or even silly, playful and modest.

Take H&M’s spring/summer 2017 campaign featuring Naomi Campbell dancing alongside a gang of international models to Wham!’s male empowerment tune, Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do). No slogan tees. No pickets or pussyhats. Just independent, sexy women, having fun and looking glam. All whilst making an implicit feminist statement. Or John Lewis’ 2017 And/Or: Denim Born of LA campaign, which simply follows the everyday lives (and bums) of women, with a feminist attitude, by delicately ensuring they’re sexy, but not sexualised.

“…shouldn’t feminism be less about what models are wearing, as much as who they are, their attitude, beliefs and what they’re doing?”

And the casual shot of a mum breastfeeding in public is without comment and largely incidental. This is what I call tacit feminism.

You could even argue Harvey Nichols’ 2016 partnership with Vogue, Bo Gilbert: the 100-Year-Old Model carried an implicit feminist message. More speciﬁcally, the campaign tackled ageism in the fashion industry. But, at the same time, it carries a less-overt feminist message, about beauty standards for women universally. It’s both progressive and deﬁant, but cleverly couched in Bo’s moving story.

There’s no arguing that 2017 was beyond time for fashion to take a loud stand for women. But as the ever-ﬁckle industry inevitably moves on from the ‘trend’ of feminism– it can and should remain an enduring and implicit ‘style’, that inﬂuences everything we do. S

turning NEW LIEFS

Deriving its name from a Dutch word meaning ‘beloved, kind, treasured and even cute’, the newly launched production company Lief, has something rather cuddly about it. As its founder, producer and former B-Reel MD, Margo Mars, explains to Olivia Atkins, her mission is to create a family of close collaborators who’ll share their visions and take fashion ﬁlm and other art forms to the next level

As the old adage goes, ‘it’s not what you wear, it’s the way that you wear it’. Style is so much more than just the clothes you put on; it’s about attitude. Which is why, speaking with Lief founder Margo Mars as she’s curled up in an armchair basking in the heat of the ﬁre at London’s Soho House, playing girlishly with her neckerchief, I can’t help but recall the last line of the Gwen Stefani song Harajuku Girls, “Girl, you’ve got style.” It’s so applicable.

The fact that style appears to be at the heart of everything Mars does is, she claims, purely accidental and just how things have panned out. She’s even surprised that we chose to proﬁle her new venture, Lief, for our fashion-focussed issue. “I ﬁnd it interesting that Lief has only recently launched and yet you’ve looked at our output and our brand and asked us if we specialise in fashion,” says Mars. “The answer is ‘no’ but you do recognise that we specialise in style. Everything we do has a sense of style.”

“You’ve got to make stu that cuts through and stands out, especially on social. To be visible you’ve got to make something that’s not perfect. Traditional marketing is perfect.”

Launching with a stylishly-curated roster and a few fashion-branded pieces was perhaps inevitable, given Mars’ interest in the industry and previous experience working on fashion campaigns. Since Lief opened its doors in November last year, she’s secured four leading directors to her roster –Danny Sangra, Free The Bid founder Alma Ha’rel, Natasha Khan and Eva Michon. Having worked with and befriended most of them (or initially admired them from afar as in the case of Sangra), Mars pulled together this stellar directorial line-up to tackle “the transformation of the content market” and give a new slant to the usual production model. One that allows her to be more playful with people that share her outlook. Rather than respond solely to creative briefs, Mars encourages her directors to continue expressing themselves and working as artists.

The company also includes NEW Lief, which o ers emerging directors a chance to build their

reels and experiment with di erent styles, and LOVE Lief, a roster made up of artists from di erent disciplines; photographers, painters, illustrators and the like.

There’s no one characteristic that deﬁnes a Lief director, or a Lief ‘creature’ as Mars more a ectionally calls them, “it’s about uniqueness, having a really clear voice, being a bit of a badass, but also being really open, honest and humble,” she says. Nurturing talent and playing the matriarchal role in the development of her directors’ careers is all part of the Lief mandate, after all the company name means ‘sweet and kind’ in her mother tongue, Dutch. “I asked my mum how she would describe me,” says Mars. “She just texted back one word: ‘lief’. I instantly liked it; it’s short and many people don’t know what it means. But, I don’t always want to be lief, as in sweet, so that’s how the badass lioness logo came about.”

Lief’s logo is symbolic of Mars’ emphasis on artistic endeavour, it was a chance to experiment, have fun and most importantly, collaborate. The lioness symbolises her company’s emphasis on female empowerment; the wings, the ﬂight of creative inspiration – it was a labour of love between Mars’ partner Dave Cooke, director Danny Sangra and DIZZY ZEBRA, the motion graphics creatives who are signed to LOVE Lief. The roles are intentionally blurred at Lief, as Mars encourages as much collaboration between the di erent artists as possible. “It’s not a one-way street, it’s something that we go into together,” she says, describing their shared approach to taking on work. She says Alma Ha’rel is an inspiration, a friend, conﬁdante and motivational force. Personality is what counts for Mars when she gathers her Lief creatures around her.

How a mutant brain led the way

Jobs have poured in since Lief’s launch, some just arriving on Mars’ doorstep thanks to her existing connections. She recently produced The Greatest Luxury, a ﬁlm for Selfridges directed by Kathryn Ferguson, which focusses on modern deﬁnitions of luxury. “Kathryn approached me when she was starting to write it to see if I wanted to produce

“I don’t always want to be lief, as in sweet, so that’s how the badass lioness logo came about.”

“Fashion has always relied heavily on print ... But its video content that people [are starting to] want; that’s where the industry has to go. Most of the budget still goes to print,”

it with her.” She says it was a one-o collaboration but such ventures will doubtless lead to other projects for Lief.

Mars is reluctant to be boxed in by the fashion genre however. She feels that while fashion ﬁlm has undeniably developed as an art form, its transformation has been slow and it’s been seen by some in the past as nothing more than moving look books. However, she’s conﬁdent that the

genre is heading in the right direction and cites Spike Jonze’s 2016 ﬁlm for Kenzo, My Mutant Brain, as having sparked a change in how the medium was perceived. With its curious choreography that broke fashion norms and exhibited character beyond the clothes, it provided hope for the tastemakers of ﬁlm: “Kenzo really helped to pave the way creatively. It was cuttingedge, narratively driven and totally bonkers.”

She’s well-versed in fashion’s iconic film moments and says she has been inspired by such pivotal films as Basic Black, which was created by William Claxton back in 1967 for fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, and is considered to be the first fashion film. She also references the late Bruce Conner’s avant-garde Breakaway – the 1966 film of singer and choreographer Toni Basil dancing, dressed and undressed – as a work that inspires her goal to take on non-commercial film projects.

Mars is proud of Lief’s “multi-disciplinary” artists for their ability to draw on a range of creative references acquired from their di erent skills. Natasha Khan, better known as singer,

songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Bat For Lashes, is a perfect example, having just created a stunning short, Light Beings, for DITA eyewear, which included a soundtrack that she also wrote. “She’s a great ﬁlmmaker,” says Mars. “Because she’s got all this in her library – the music and visual stories. Similarly, Alma Har’el is an great writer and photographer, so she elevates the scripts that come her way. And Danny Sangra is a really funny illustrator so a lot of his ﬁlms are fucking comic.”

Constant ﬂow of content

1 Jamaica Dyer’s comic book based on the ﬁlm JellyWolf by Alma Har’el

2 DITA, Light Beings by Natasha Khan 3/4 Selfridges, The Greatest Luxury by Kathryn Ferguson 5/6 Chanel, CHANCE – Rider; Romantic, by Eva Michon

7 Lief Pendant featuring MyTheresa x Miu Miu, Shark by Danny Sangra

Perhaps Lief’s greatest advantage is recognising the current appetite for non-traditional advertising; the craving for wilder, more poetic aesthetics and the thirst for content. Fashion houses are struggling to create content to keep up with the rate at which it’s being consumed. Shows are being live streamed, collections shared on social and designers are expected to turn new lines out quarterly. But the biggest surprise, Mars notes, is that print is still the main medium for showcasing new designs; though she feels that that is gradually changing and that ﬁlm will become the dominant medium. “Fashion has always relied heavily on print ... But it’s video content that people [are starting to] want; that’s where the industry has to go. Most of the budget still goes to print, but [the fashion industry] is learning how to value ﬁlm.”

This change is not before time. Not only are most sales made online, but it’s also where young people look for trends – an ideal marketplace thinks Mars. “You’ve got to make stu that cuts through and stands out, especially on social,” she says. “To be visible you’ve got to make something that’s not perfect. Traditional marketing is perfect. Think of a 30-second spot for a bank or a food store; every frame is perfection; it’s classic advertising. But if you’re making a fashion ﬁlm, it should be like poetry. It can be more narrative-led. It’s not a commodity anymore. It should [o er a chance for] the director to show o their art.”

Marrying the fashion designer’s vision with that of the director is possible but trust is required. Mars is optimistic that this union is possible,

WHAT INSPIRES

Margo Mars

What product could you not live without? Lipstick.

What are your thoughts on social media? A wonderful addiction, I love it, especially Instagram.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot? I make sure I understand why there is stress, and then take a moment out to brainstorm solutions. Even if there is ‘no’ time, you have to ‘take’ time. Plus, knowing from experience, that it will all be OK, gives me an outside calm appearance that seems to do the trick!

What’s the last ﬁlm you watched and was it any good? I watched My Beautiful Broken Brain last night by the incredible Lotje Sodderland. I am obsessing over amazing documentaries at the moment (I’m working on a documentary project with The Guardian).

What’s your favourite piece of tech? My phone.

What ﬁctitious character do you most relate to? Tinkerbell.

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? An amazing chef feeding people with effortless, delicious happiness.

so long as it’s seen as an artistic collaboration that will bring the collection’s story to life.

Part of the challenge is being clear in a company’s o ering and knowing what client needs need to be met. Mars believes that she’s cracked the formula and that we’re now entering a new era of creation. Lief stands out from more traditional shops by o ering its talents a space to co-exist, rather than compete. Cross collaborations between artists are actively encouraged as Mars believes good ideas never die; they can be recycled and reinterpreted. Alma Ha’rel’s 2017 short, JellyWolf, for The Fifth Sense has set a precedent, after comic book artist Jamaica Dyer transformed Ha’rel’s cinematography into a graphic novel, leading her to join the LOVE Lief roster.

“We are ultimately a filmmaker-led company that is inventively making great productions,” says Mars. “The end goal is film. But when you release a film like JellyWolf, there are many options. We could always do a JellyWolf theatre performance, or an album with the soundtrack. You can

reinterpret a film in so many di erent ways. It’s about solving a need, too. People are so strapped for time that after five seconds of watching something they’re already scrolling on for more. So, it’s about o ering more than just the film.” Mars prefers to leave Lief’s future open and very much undefined. This way, Lief can remain flexible and adapt as and when things come up.

Social media plays a huge part in sourcing talent.

For Mars’ shots portrait artwork, she commissioned Russian illustrator, Dmitry Chaika, after ﬁnding him on Instagram. “I literally saw one of his drawings, DM-ed him and asked if we could try something,” she says. “It was very casual and evolved organically. Within one Instagram post or direct message, I extended the family. Everybody starts talking and creating, completely without hesitation. There’s never any talk about what this speciﬁcally has to be or any need to hand over a set outcome.”

If the success of the Lief collective’s collaborations so far are anything to go by, then

“It’s about solving a need, too; people are so strapped for time that after ﬁve seconds of watching something, they are already scrolling on for more. So it’s about o ering more than just the ﬁlm.”

it seems like the time is right to take a risk and pursue artistically-led advertising, or poetry as Mars calls it. Lief is expanding its pride of lionesses and Mars is keen for artists to come forward and join her in the wild. The only criteria? That you have a sense of style.

Emma Willis

The dawn of experience ecosystems

“Imagine that! Only months from now you’ll be able to launch and literally step inside the house of Dior, for example, right there in your own front room, all from a web page.”

For fashion brands wanting to offer a seamless customer experience across their physical and digital worlds, the all-new improved reality of AR could be the answer, says Emma Willis, general manager of production company makemepulse

Over the last 20 years, online behaviours have deeply modified people’s expectations when it comes to modes of fashion consumption. A recent report by [management consultancy] Bain & Company projects 70 per cent of luxury purchases are influenced by online interactions, but that 75 per cent of sales will still occur in physical stores until 2025. Meanwhile, online continues to outpace offline in terms of growth, but the dominant digital players of the age – Amazon, Uber, Airbnb – are the ones that have managed to bridge the gap between the physical and interactive worlds, leaving fashion brands trailing.

What has this got to do with advertising? We are living in a time where customer services, retail stores, e-commerce and social media are seen as a single entity by consumers; a result of shifting between the digital and physical realms of a brand daily. In this New World Order, marketers are leaning heavily on their agency partners to think about, if not map out entirely, the customer experience across all touchpoints. With all the decision-/desire-making happening online, campaigns can no longer start with a traditional above-the-line campaign, as they may have done in the past. So the creative industry needs to start with a rethink of the role of online, and how to craft consumers an ecosystem of experience. Why? Because consumers want experiences! What they want is the heritage, craftsmanship and prestige of a brand; what they want is the way it feels to buy a Mulberry handbag, a Chanel dress, a Céline purse, and they want to be shown it in the context of their own lives.

When the online store is a crashing bore

Currently, when I go to ‘shop the ﬁnest designer brands curated by Parisian fashion experts’ at 24sevres.com (LVMH’s multi-brand e-commerce platform) or to net-a-porter.com, ‘the world’s leading online luxury fashion retailer’, why is my experience of both absolutely identical and dreary? I can search, scroll, add to my basket and checkout. Yawn. Conversely, if I go to a Mulberry store, the customer service and environment, the service and the decor would all be very different to a Louis Vuitton store. The retail experience is always carefully designed to help people understand how the brand

ﬁts into their life, to help them cross over from thinking about to deciding, ‘I’m a Mulberry person,’ or, ‘I’m a Louis Vuitton person’. What’s the point of spending all that money on differentiation in stores when the decision-making is happening way before they walk through the door?

And this is my point. With increasing frequency agencies are being called upon to marry interactive touchpoints in considered and creative combinations both with each other and with physical shops. The brief, should you choose to accept it, is to deliver a seamless customer experience everywhere. So, how do you do it?

If the success of a brand depends on the ability of advertising to help people understand what the essence of the product is, why it’s the right product for them to buy, then there is no better way than augmented reality. AR is a technology designed to display content in the context of the consumer’s life, making it ripe for immersion not only into a brand’s history and heritage, but into experiences that embrace audience’s individual tastes too.

Bringing Dior to your own front door

Thanks to Apple, Google and co., there are now millions of consumers in possession of iPhones and Android devices able to support AR. Currently, the best quality experiences require an app, but don’t let that put you off; Google just announced imminent plans to bring AR to the web. Imagine that! Only months from now you’ll be able to launch and literally step inside the house of Dior, for example, right there in your own front room, all from a web page.

There is a saying that, ‘where luxury goes, the high street follows’, but it’s been high-street brands, such as New Look and ASOS, Nike and Gap blazing the trail with AR in the industry to date. The tide seemed to be turning at the end of last year though, with Burberry, Galeries Lafayette, W Magazine and Vogue being a few high-end names to dip their toes in interactive waters.

Ultimately, the aim of any brand is to offer a truly differentiated experience, but if fashion in particular has to sell experiences to keep customers interested, they’ll be happy to know that, as of now, they can invite audiences deep into the story – any story –on any surface.

Simply the best…

Starting in the early 1900s as mere frock displays, fashion films are now multi-genre art forms with their own jamborees. Fashion film consultant and curator, Niccolo Montanari, presents a guide to the 15 top fashion film fests to be seen at in 2018

1 Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

31 May 2018

EVENT DATES 7-11 Nov 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES £24 - £45

TICKETS TBC, see asff.co.uk

The type of content that falls under the term fashion film is something that over the years has gradually been getting broader. Though its definition may have yet to be agreed upon unanimously, its role is becoming somewhat clearer. Many directors are seeing fashion film as a way to establish a name for themselves, as well as the chance to enjoy working on less commercial, more creative projects.

Catering for the increased amount of content being created, a raft of new film festivals has exploded onto the scene in the past ten years. Furthermore, already established film festivals have began opening up specific categories for this genre. Finding out which film festivals to submit to and attend has become a timeconsuming task. There are several aspects to consider including: who’s going to be looking at your film, what kind of visibility you will gain from being selected and what’s the likelihood of being included in the programme?

I have attended several film festivals around the world with a fashion focus or category, and have also worked with filmmakers on their distribution strategies. As a result, I’ve been able to assess which events are worth the time, effort and cost to submit to. This is a selection of those that have been active in the past two years, are either solely fashion-focussed or have fashion film categories and work hard to make sure that the best fashion films are recognised and highlighted.

Now in its eighth year, the BAFTA-recognised short film festival based in York, UK, celebrates quality and innovation in a range of film genres, including fashion film. The festival has a unique atmosphere and gives York’s thriving arts scene an extra buzz over the course of five days. Featuring a very rich programme, Aesthetica offers the chance for directors from many different backgrounds to come together and be inspired by each other’s work.

THEY SAY “Aesthetica celebrates all short ﬁlms and looks at the interplay between them. From a curation point-of-view, we look at fashion ﬁlm as an amalgamation of many genres, including art, dance, music, documentary, narrative and branded content.”

Cherie Federico, founder/ festival director

PICTURED Cinecitta On Wheels, by Inti Cardon

2 A Shaded View on Fashion Film (ASVOFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

31 March 2018

EVENT DATES June 2018

3 Berlin Fashion Film Festival

(BFFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

28 February 2018

EVENT DATES 12-13 July 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES €39 - €499

TICKETS €249 - €499

SUBMISSIONS FEES €25 - €45

TICKETS Free, invitation only for opening and closing ceremony

Founded by visionary fashion icon Diane Pernet, ASVOFF was the first ever fashion film festival. The event was set up in 2008 in Paris as a way to bring together fashion and film, with a strong focus on contemporary art, music and design – something that is reflected in the programme. The event aims to nourish and showcase young creative talents, providing them with access to Diane Pernet’s extensive international network.

THEY SAY “ASVOFF considers fashion to be primarily a culture rather than an industry, one that most of us can’t deny we belong to, which helps us to deﬁne our identity, to enhance our singularities, to express our sensibilities and our commitments.”

Diane Pernet, festival director

PICTURED Kenzo, Snowbird, by Sean Baker

BFFF sits at crossroads between an advertising and fashion ﬁlm festival. Now in its seventh year, its programme is very much tailored around facilitating connections between directors, production companies, agencies and clients through B2B events and networking opportunities.

THEY SAY “Rather than focussing on ﬁlms that are purely about fashion, at BFFF we also highlight and award work done for lifestyle brands and music videos as long they feature a strong emphasis on aesthetics.”

Frank Funke, founder/festival director

PICTURED The Sleeping Field, by THAT JAM

4 Bokeh South Africa International Fashion Film Festival

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

28 February 2018

EVENT DATES TBC, contact info@bokehfestival.co.za

SUBMISSIONS FEES Free TICKETS Free, registration required

Coming up to its ﬁfth edition, this festival comprises a series of 10 ‘mini-festivals’ held in various locations around the country during the year, culminating in two red-carpet style awards galas held 6 and 7 April 2018 in Cape Town, and then 13 and 14 April 2018 in Johannesburg. Bokeh puts a great emphasis on encouraging collaborations; assisting ﬁlmmakers in making the most of their time in the country by supporting them in location scouting and shooting new content.

THEY SAY “Bokeh offers our guests an environment that celebrates fashion, ﬁlm, music, technology and design – while enjoying the world’s best fashion ﬁlms.” Adrian Lazarus, founder/festival director

PICTURED Statues, by Josh Brandão and Nicolai Kornum

5 Canadian International Fashion Film Festival (CANIFFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

25 March 2018

EVENT DATES 4-5 May 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES C$30

TICKET PRICES C$20 -C$150

Set in Calgary, the goal of this festival is to act as conduit between Canadian talent and the international fashion film network, by facilitating collaboration with other film festivals and platforms. Its selection of fashion films reflects a purist vision in which the garments play a leading role.

THEY SAY “CANIFFF supports filmmakers in their craft, awards their efforts and empowers their careers. We find it exciting when we see filmmakers, composers and make-up artists go on from CANIFFF to take home awards in many of the other festivals.” Katrina Olson-Mottahed, co-founder/festival director

PICTURED LITOST directed by Gsus Lopez /still by Raúl Hidalgo

6 Ciclope Festival

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

21 September 2018

EVENT DATES 8-9 November 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES €90 - €425

TICKET PRICES TBC, contact info@ciclopefestival.com

The international ﬁlm craft event now based in Berlin is entirely dedicated to the art of execution and welcomes fashion ﬁlm entries as a special category. It offers mix of seminars, workshops and inspiring talks, with past speakers having hailed from brands and organisations such as Audi, The Guardian and the Advertising Producers Association.

THEY SAY “To us, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fashion ﬁlm, a commercial or a music video: we are interested in the craftsmen behind the camera.” Francisco Condorelli, festival director

PICTURED #WeBelieveInThePower OfLove, by Luca Finotti

7 CinéFashion Film Awards

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

TBC – currently able to submit by emailing cffainfo@cinemoius.com

EVENT DATES 8 - 9 November 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES Free TICKET PRICES US$100 -US$1000

The CinéFashion Film Awards has been taking place in Hollywood since 2014 and is the annual awards show for the US television network Cinemoi, which focusses on ﬁlm, fashion and style. Compared to other fashion ﬁlm festivals, it is all about the glitzy awards show, which has featured such illustrious guests and presenters as Stevie Wonder, Carmen Electra and Dionne Warwick.

THEY SAY “The CinéFashion Film Awards does not only focus on fashion, style or fashion ﬁlms but we focus on philanthropy that helps speak the silent language of hope throughout the globe.” Daphna Edwards Ziman, founder, president and CCO, Cinémoi

PICTURED Bello, by Monica Menez

8 Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival

SUBMISSION DEADLINE TBC for 2019

EVENT DATES 8-10 February 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES €25 - €40

TICKET PRICES DKK 50 - DKK 210

Set up in 2015, the Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival explores fashion film from a modern as well as from a more historical point of view. The annual event features screenings, talks and exhibitions following a different theme every year, with a strong focus on highlighting Nordic talent. Its selection of films ranges from abstract and surreal content to more storylinebased films and documentaries.

THEY SAY “The festival focusses on the connections between fashion, film and artistic practices through various film screenings, talks, debates and special events. The festival has changing themes related to the cultural aspects of the history, present and future of fashion and film.”

Ditte Marie Lund, founder/ festival director

PICTURED Uniform of Great Hope, by Tobias Birk Nielsen

9 FASHIONCLASH Fashion Film Festival (FFFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE TBC

EVENT DATES TBC, contact info@fashionclash.nl

SUBMISSIONS FEES €35 - €50

TICKETS Free, invitation only for speciﬁc events

Newly launched in 2017, this is the Netherlands’ ﬁrst fashion ﬁlm festival and was developed as part of FASHIONCLASH, an annual international, interdisciplinary event that takes place in Maastricht and offers emerging artists and designers a platform to present to industry leaders.

THEY SAY “With FFFF we present an international ﬁlm festival that not only functions as a platform for fashion ﬁlms but also as a dialogue to question and develop the genre.”

Branko Popovic, founder/director

PICTURED The Parallel Pyramid Platform, by Dennis Vanderbroeck

10 Fashion Film Fest Istanbul

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

31 August 2018

EVENT DATES 17-18 November 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES Free

TICKET PRICES Free

With three editions down the line, Fashion Film Fest Istanbul has managed to consistently feature important players from the fashion and ﬁlm industry among its jury and speakers, including names such as Gareth Pugh, Damir Doma and Bruno Aveillan. The annual programme features talks, panels and workshops in Turkish and English, as well as screenings of an international selection of fashion ﬁlms from partner festivals worldwide.

THEY SAY “In a city often described as a bridge between Europe and Asia, Fashion Film Fest Istanbul aims to extend this identity to all the realms that fashion encounters every day including contemporary art, music and media.” Tula Yilmaz, festival director

PICTURED Flyte, Cathy Come Home by Femke Huurdeman

11 Fashion Film Festival Milano (FFFMilano)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE 15 May 2018

EVENT DATES 19-25 September 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES Free

TICKET PRICES Free to attend, registration required

In just four years, the annual Fashion Film Festival Milano has become an important international destination for directors working in fashion ﬁlm. The event spans several days, and includes panels and talks with international fashion industry professionals, plus screenings of ﬁlms curated by Vice Italy CD, Gloria Maria Cappelletti.

THEY SAY “FFFMilano is a democratic event opening the world of fashion to the wider audience: it’s a unique window through which the big names in fashion meet emerging talent.”

Constanza Cavalli Etro, founder/ festival director

PICTURED Inﬁnite Path, by Francesco Torricella & Arice

12 LA Fashion Film Festival (LAFFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE 15 July 2018

EVENT DATES 4-6 October 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES $100 - $250

TICKET PRICES Free to attend, registration required

Premiering this year, the two-day LA Fashion Film Festival is the most recent addition to the fashion film festival scene and offers dialogues between filmmakers, industry leaders, digital innovators and members of our influential jury. With its prime location at the hub of the motion picture industry it is one to look out for.

THEY SAY “LAFFF is here to foster greater fusion between fashion and ﬁlm producers in order to reach and engage with the connected consumer.”

Justin Merino, festival co-founder

13 La Jolla

International Fashion Film Festival (LJIFFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE 29 May 2018

EVENT DATES 19-21 July 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES Free TICKET PRICES Free to attend, invitation only

Now entering its 9th year, this was the first international fashion film festival established in North America and –located at the sunny Californian resort of La Jolla – bills itself as the Cannes of the fashion film world. It’s a well attended event that offers good networking opportunities and support for winners by facilitating professional collaborations across the States.

THEY SAY “La Jolla is global collaborative collective of ﬁlmmakers. Our goal is to authentically promote our creative potential in the marketplace of the world.”

Fred Sweet, founder/festival director

PICTURED Statures of Gods by Arthur Valverde

14 Mexico Fashion Film Festival (MFFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE TBC, contact info@mexicofff.com.mx

EVENT DATES TBC

SUBMISSIONS FEES Free TICKET PRICES Free to attend, invitation only for special events and the awards ceremony

Taking place in Mexico City and championing Mexican talent and local productions, Mexico Fashion Film Festival celebrates fashion ﬁlm as form of expression for professionals and amateurs alike. This is a particularly interesting festival as it offers a way to gain visibility throughout Latin America, though it retains an international appeal by collaborating with selected ﬁlm festivals worldwide.

THEY SAY “My work for the festival is to humanise fashion, in order to make it a cultural matter as well as a creative expression. We want to awake the youngsters’ curiosity so they can tell stories through fashion ﬁlm.”

Luisa Sáenz, festival director

PICTURED Madame Technicolor, by Patricia Arzimanoglou

15 Video Art and Experimental Film Festival (VAEFF)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE 15 May 2018

EVENT DATES 8-11 November 2018

SUBMISSIONS FEES US$37 - US$55

TICKET PRICES US$15 - US$45

Based in New York City, VAEFF prides itself in selecting the most conceptually and aesthetically daring video art and experimental films from across the globe – with one of it’s themes being the new wave of fashion films. Unlike other film festivals, the event does not feature an awards element, but focusses screenings, followed by Q&A’s, giving the chance to directors to connect and network with the audience.

THEY SAY “VAEFF seeks to push the boundaries of what is considered video art, selecting works that reﬂect the medium’s current reality as opposed to its traditional deﬁnition.”

Dan Fine, director and chief curator

PICTURED Paris Go Zones for i-D, by Cyprien Clément-Delmas

Unravelling

At just 23, Omar Khaleel has already notched up editorial commissions for Hypebeast, Vice Digital, Highsnobiety and more, plus shoots for clients such as Fila, Kappa, adidas and K.Swiss and was dubbed ‘one to watch’ by the BJP. Drawing on both his British/Yemeni heritage and the urban youth culture of his native Birmingham, he describes his work as fashion documentary. His mission, he tells Carol Cooper, is to tell the complex stories embedded in the very fabric of fashion

the rag trade

‘What people wear is like a story, and like most good stories, it’s complicated. I just try to unravel it.”

ﬁrst glance, Fake Sh*t, Omar Khaleel’s extraordinary editorial for Hypebeast, appears to be a pretty straightforward, customarily edgy fashion shoot – a diverse trio of youths in Burberry and Gucci gear strike insouciant poses while giving that slightly challenging, clear-eyed, level gaze to camera. But look closer and something’s not quite right; the clue’s in the title... how top end are those togs, why is one of the models upside down; the focus on her distorted reﬂection in a pond? And what is the incongruous English

country house location saying? It turns out the models are sporting knock-o labels, posing in the grounds of a stately home signifying a luxury life they are at odds with.

“The focus was to demonstrate the power of celebrity lifestyle culture,” Khaleel explains. “Having aspirations is a good thing, but in this case what people are seeing is mainly ﬁctional and completely out of their price range. Luxury photoshoots create an image of glamour and happiness associated with expensive brands, and with social media, these images

are everywhere. People feel they ‘need’ to have these things, even it means faking it, because image is everything – they believe these things will bring them success and happiness. It’s an unrealistic and unhealthy environment.”

Cerebral but stylish

It would almost seem that Khaleel is striking an anti-fashion pose, yet he says he grew up with as much concern for his self-image as the next streetwise teen. “I wanted to look good and be that guy known for

p60 Bi-cultural for Highsnobiety 1/2 Fake Sh*t for Hypebeast

“Having aspirations is a good thing, but in this case what people are seeing is mainly fictional and completely out of their price range.”

his dress sense and trainers style.”

So, although he has always been drawn to fashion, his natural philosophical bent prompts him to explore the ideas surrounding it. “The way people choose to present and identify themselves; how they define their success, is influenced by lots of things – their background and environment, the people they hang out with and the celebrities they like. I try to understand and capture this visually,” he says. “Fashion is one of the most obvious ways a person presents themselves to the world, so can be a brilliant way to challenge fixed ideas and stereotypes. What people wear is like a story, and like most good stories, it is complicated. I just try to unravel it.”

The thread of the story

His journey of fashion exploration actually begun soon after he’d embarked on a graphics design course at Birmingham City

University: “I soon started to feel limited by the images available, so I started taking my own shots to give me what I wanted visually,” he says. He then switched to visual communications/photography, setting about it with a dedication that was part of his upbringing. “I learnt from my mother, uncle and granddad you must work hard for what you want.” Each week he’d try out a di erent shoot – ﬁlm, digital, studio and location – and just six months into his two-year course, his career was kickstarted by a shoot exploring how young men are a ected by growing up in deprived areas. It was picked up by online fashion title The Daily Street. Another break was a fashion story for Birminghambased streetwear brand Dark Circle Clothing. He says his work back then wasn’t that great but “they saw potential in me and I’m grateful.”

He is methodical about his approach and always starts o with

the concept: “I can be inspired by anything I see or hear, but once an idea enters my head, it quickly develops into a complete story. I know the message I want to put across, the location, the style/styling and the model’s look. It all comes together and then I do some research to develop the project.”

Philosphophy in fashion

Khaleel was raised solely by his mother and, in his project Momma’s Boy for Highsnobiety, he sensitively examines stereotypes surrounding the mother-son bond. “I know many young men who were brought up by single mothers, or in two-parent families with strong mothers,” he says. “Instead of recognising the positive aspects of these relationships, the phrase ‘momma’s boy’ is often used in a negative way, which can undermine a boy’s relationship with his mother at a very vulnerable time his life.”

Another ‘story’ he’s examined is the British-Arab experience. In Bi-cultural, also for Highsnobiety, he shot between Morocco and the UK, blending Western brands, like Nike and adidas, with traditional Arab dress. He sees his own bi-cultural heritage as something to celebrate: “Like most people with ethnic and racial roots from across the world, both my cultural heritage and the place where I was born have given me a strong sense of identity. Yemenis are very sociable and I feel fortunate that my family has always mixed with people from all cultural and social backgrounds.”

So what’s next for Khaleel? He says he’s up for more commercial work; he has just ﬁnished shoots for adidas Originals and K.Swiss and he’s also interested in adding more videography to his portfolio. Whatever the future holds for this inquisitive artist, his own story will doubtless be worth following. S

“Yemenis are very sociable and I’m fortunate that my family has always mixed with people from all cultural backgrounds.”

WHEN TROUBLES ARE HARD TO BEAR

Not content with producing an ape that spoke to the nation about chocolate via the medium of drums (Cadbury’s Gorilla), Matthew Fone, owner of Ri Ra ﬁlms, set about producing a bear that speaks to children about their problems. He tells Tim Cumming about working with 18 Feet & Rising’s Anna Carpen to bring the cuddly concept to life

How are you feeling today? Is there anything you’d like to talk about? Are there things you ﬁnd hard to say in front of other people? If so, why not pop a note in the pouch here, and let that note do the communicating for you. Unlike a message in a bottle, you’ll deﬁnitely get a reply.

The essence of advertising and branding is communication and connection, and for Ri Ra ’s Matthew Fone, who’s produced music videos for the likes of Madonna, Coldplay, Muse, and Kings of Leon, and was part of the team who helped deliver Cadbury’s Gorilla to the world (“we just wanted to do an advert that made you feel like you do when you eat chocolate”), opening a new conduit of communication with kids was a real-world, non-branded reason for embarking on his current sideline; a passion project featuring an idiosyncratic stu ed toy who is designed to be a child’s conﬁdante and a conduit for parental love, support and guidance.

There are not many of us who didn’t have, at some tender age, a comfort toy, a stu ed animal that trailed around with us, was part of family holidays, that sat on our laps on every car journey, and on every trip to the grandparents. But the cuddly toy Fone is developing is a little di erent. “His name’s Yako, which is Okay backwards. My friend Anna Carpen [creative partner at 18 Feet & Rising] had this idea for a bear or a toy that would help communicate with kids.” He says he felt the same excitement about Yako as he felt about the Gorilla concept; “As soon as Anna talked to me about this bear who can communicate, I thought, ‘that is a great idea,’ and I wanted to do it.”

Toying with troubles

He says moving from producing ﬁlms to furry critters has been a learning curve. “It’s out of my comfort zone. I can make any ﬁlm that can be made – if you want to shoot anywhere in the world, I can do that. It’s a variation on a theme. But this, getting a product out in to the world, that’s di erent. And it’s stimulating.”

The prototype was tested at home: “We got a seamstress in, and made one with the intention of using it with my children.” They messed around with designs, experimented with how the mouth would move, what the fur would be made of, what the ears and the eyes would be like. “We went through this process but then we got to this place where I was able to give it to my youngest child, Jake, and it just worked,” says Fone. “He’s not got any issues, he’s just a normal kid – the point of this is that it is not meant to be for kids with serious troubles or who can’t communicate at all. It’s for the everyday things.” Things like worrying about your new Year Six teacher, or being afraid of the dark. Jake would write a note and put it

“It’s cuddly, children feel safe with it, they can write a note to it at night, Mum and Dad can go in, look at it…”

“It’s for the everyday things. Things like worrying about your new Year Six teacher, or being afraid of the dark.”

in the pouch for Fone to read, and then Fone would slip a supportive response back into the pouch. “I want it to be something that can help everybody, because we have all got varying degrees of behavioural issues,” says Fone. “It’s cuddly, children feel safe with it, they can write a note to it at night, Mum and Dad can go in, look at it – when the mouth is turned around so that it is sad, that means there is a note [from their child] in it.”

Handling the bear necessities

Simple ideas are hard to get right, but what he and Carpen, as creatives, had come up with, was a powerful conduit for children who ﬁnd it di cult to open up. “I spoke to a child psychologist about Yako and they were very supportive,” says Fone. “They said, ‘If I have a child who has behavioural issues, they won’t answer me when I ask them questions, but if I put a glove on my hand and pretend it’s a puppet and talk through them, they will tell me most things’.”

He got 100 Yakos handmade by a Colombian seamstress – the partner of one of his interns at Ri Ra – and started giving them to friends and showing them around at toy fairs and the like. He talked to PRs about bringing a new product to market and found out how to handle the nuts and bolts of production.

As well as cuddly Yako himself, Fone has created tote bags, pads, pencils and badges sporting such slogans as, ‘I only talk to my bear’ and ‘My other friend’s a bear’. Even the label is quirkily in keeping with the central idea and lists the ‘materials’ in Yako’s make-up as ‘Yako – 75% okay, 10% nervous, 3% scared, 12% proud.’ “It’s to show people we’re all made up of di erent emotions and they are okay,” says Fone. “There’s nothing wrong with being scared or nervous or worried. And even just being able to talk about it helps, so that if you educate kids at a certain age, when they grow up maybe they’ll be better human beings.” He laughs. “It’s good to communicate. I suppose, that is the bottom line of it.” S

Matthew Fone and Anna Carpen with their cuddly creation Yako Fone’s son Jake below

CO-CREATIVE COLLABORATOR

Having started out client-side – as Heineken’s global comms manager she worked on the lauded Legends ads – Sandrine Huijgen believes in close, early collaboration between brand and creative. Now, as co-founder of agency Cloudfactory, she tells

David Knight how the Dutch shop’s success is due to involving craft folk as soon as possible, too – a good credo for this year’s Dubai Lynx Film Craft jury leader...

As president of the Film Craft jury at Dubai Lynx 2018, Sandrine Huijgen will lead her fellow jury members in judging skill and artistry in 12 craft categories, including direction, production design, cinematography, editing, sound design and visual e ects. One thing that Huijgen is certain about: technical excellence may be important, but it will not be enough on its own to win an award at this festival. The winners will have done far more than that. “I really think that craft should be in service of an idea.” says Huijgen. “That’s what I’ll be looking for – where the craft has really elevated the idea, and made it remarkable.” She also points out that great work has to adapt to all screens. “We live in a digital world and it has transformed the industry, but it doesn’t mean we should do pieces of shit on the internet. An amazing piece of craft works on your phone, on your computer, on your giant screen TV, at the cinema.”

Looking at craft and creative clouds

Huijgen’s ﬁrmly-held convictions are the result of two decades of experience on both sides of the client/creative divide. In 2014, after a highly successful career on the client side, she left her role as global communications director at Heineken to become a creative partner at Cloudfactory in Amsterdam. There, she joined fellow partners Jessica Kersten, Sandeep Chalwa and Oliver Teepe at an agency that has done things di erently ever since it launched in 2009, engaging in nontraditional forms of advertising, encouraging its clients to make a positive impact with the creative work, and putting craft at the heart of its manifesto.

“I really think craft should be in service of an idea. That’s what I’ll be looking for – where the craft has really elevated the idea, and made it remarkable.”

Since Huijgen came on board, TV advertising has been added to Cloudfactory’s multi-disciplinary craft-based approach. Its clients now include Strongbow Cider, Booking. com, and beef jerky brand Jack Links. But the emphasis remains on making things, often real objects, that will stand the test of time. “We do fully integrated campaigns,” Huijgen explains. “There is usually a TVC, but we also do a lot of other things – activations, installations, create physical objects.” Props for photographic campaigns are created at the agency’s own workshop studio, by Cloudfactory’s full-time designer and other artists, recruited for speciﬁc projects. But also, in keeping with the agency philosophy of creating more than a conventional ad, there have been large-scale creative collaborations.

For Strongbow, the agency partnered with the Swale project to bring to New York City a floating forest on a barge that had already been created by horticultural artist Mary Mattingly –the project film was directed by Fredrik Bond. He also directed the film of another Cloudfactory project for Strongbow, Nature Remix, in which guerilla gardeners built a tree sculpture laden with apples in an abandoned urban space in Johannesburg.

Getting her ideas to ﬂy... with Ryanair

As Huijgen points out, all of the work stems from Cloudfactory’s policy of involving the craft – directors, photographers, artists – at a very early stage in the process. So Bond, for example, was on board even before the agency had a ﬁnal script. “We really want them for what they can bring, so we work together to write the script,” she says. “Directors are actually better at writing scripts than any of us. They know practically how [the script] turns into images.”

This approach, which runs counter to how projects generally pass from agencies to production companies, comes from Huijgen’s experience of the benefits of powerful collaboration; not least between herself and Jessica Kersten. They first met and worked together when Huijgen was an advertising manager at electronics giant Philips’, and Kersten and Chalwa were both at DDB. Several years of fruitful collaboration included making an eight-minute film to advertise Philips latest hi-tech TV. “There was freedom to really experiment and do cool things at the time,” she recalls. “When we sat down together to ask ‘what is Cloudfactory about?’, we realised that craft was important, but co-creativity was also important because that’s how we used to work as client and creative. And that’s how we want to work with directors and photographers and any craftspeople.”

Huijgen hails from Brittany, but after studying advertising at university, she decided to leave France and move to Dublin, where she picked up her ﬁrst marketing job at Ryanair, when it was the young upstart of the air travel business and o ered only two routes to mainland Europe. With a very limited budget, she promoted the brand using the only means at her disposal: free plane tickets. “I organised a lot of competitions and made constant deals with newspapers, TV stations and radio stations [allowing them] to give tickets to their consumers [in exchange for] space to get my message across.”

When she moved to Amsterdam (“I met a Dutch man and followed my heart”), she found herself in the market research department at Philips – this was before her marketing talents were spotted. When she later moved to Heineken, she says “I was lucky in that I arrived in a period where Heineken was looking to ﬁnd its way again as a global brand.” She would go

“We realised that… co-creativity was also important because that’s how we used to work as client and creative. And that’s how we want to work with directors and photographers and craftspeople.”

on to lead global brand strategy development and co-create the successful Legends campaign with W+K Amsterdam. “Once you crack a big idea and a campaign, you really [set your creativity] on a highway,” she says. “Then we did a lot of great stu on TV; on digital; we did activations – a lot of di erent things.”

Huijgen also continued to work with Kersten on creative projects and “funny things”, including a brand book in the shape of a Heineken bottle. “We were having a lot of fun and we always worked really well together. For a long time I had wanted to be a creative, and then Jessica asked me to join her. She wanted to make Cloudfactory not just pure craft, but also a bit more commercial, and ﬁnd a good way to be a creative studio that could still serve brands.”

The clue is within the client

“I used to be a client, and I know that they often have the answer. It’s just,–how do you get it out and what do you do with it?”

Huijgen’s previous experiences on the client side clearly boosts her desire to collaborate closely with them for the best results. “We really like to try to spend time with the clients and understand what they want,” she says. “I used to be the client, and I know that they often have the answer. It’s just – how do you get that out and what do you do with it?”.

A good example of her philosophy is Cloudfactory’s work with Amsterdam-based travel website Booking.com. Last year’s ad, and the new one for 2018, were both created purely from footage shot by Booking.com’s employees, as they travelled the globe themselves. “We engaged their 14,000 employees to go out there and ﬁlm the world during their travels – and to show that Booking.com is not just a website,” says Huijgen, “it’s actually full of people who are passionate about travel. And they are also very experienced travellers.”

With another major project for an (as yet) undisclosed new client taking shape in the Cloudfactory studio, it is an exciting time for the agency. But with Dubai Lynx coming soon, Huijgen says she is also excited – and slightly nervous – about her responsibilities as leader of the Film Craft jury, while being determined to make it fun, too. “It’s important that I make sure that we award great work, but we must also really learn from each other and enjoy it together. I’m going to do everything possible to make it a great experience for everyone.” S

A PRESCIENT POLYMATH

“Who the fuck is this guy and why do we have to listen to him?”. So said the folks at Y&R South Africa when Jason Xenopoulos bagged his ﬁrst job in advertising... at ECD level. Tim Cumming discovers there are many good reasons to listen to the chief vision o cer of VML, CCO of VML (EMEA), leader of this year’s Dubai Lynx branded content jury and the man who foretold the rise of digital in the mid-90s

Actor, scriptwriter, filmmaker, producer, digital content provider, creative director… at one time Jason Xenopoulos wore so many hats on his path through the worlds of film, TV and advertising that he suspected a severe case of professional multiple personality disorder, a condition that resolved itself only when he set up Native (now part of VML South Africa) in 2010, and the di erent paths he’d explored coalesced into one multifaceted seam of what we call branded entertainment. “It was the industry that started to think I was schizophrenic,” he says, as he talks me through his career. “Like, what is this guy, a digital web development guy, an advertising guy, a film director? That sat uncomfortably with quite a lot of people, and with me, because I knew I wanted to do all of these things, but they seemed almost dilettantish.”

That di cult second ﬁlm

This was when he was at Y&R South Africa, with whom he’d signed as ECD – his first job in advertising. Y&R bagged him on the strength of Critical Assignment, one of the first branded feature films, made by Guinness in 2004. A pan-African actioner with a Bond-like hero, Michael Power, who’d been created for Guinness ads in 1999, it was Xenopoulos’s second movie, coming two years after his own, long-gestating, low-budget art-house success, Promised Land. “Critical Assignment was a real eye opener,” he says, “right at the intersection of having movie producers and a brand client together, and it won prizes at a bunch of festivals. But I look at it now and I think it is a shit film. It was a TV commercial masquerading as a feature, but it was a great experience.”

“It

was the industry that started to think I was schizophrenic. Like, what is this guy, a digital web development guy, an advertising guy, a ﬁlm director?”

After Critical Assignment, Y&R called him in to cast an outsider’s eye over pitches for a telecoms company. “I ran the pitch with them, and at the end of it they said, we won the business, the client likes you, we want you to stay, we’ll make you ECD. So that was my ﬁrst job in advertising. Which was pretty weird. People were going, “who the fuck is this guy and why do we have to listen to him?”

A New York state of mind

Why, indeed? Brought up in Johannesburg – the son of a Cypriot immigrant who had arrived in South African with just £5 in his pocket – Xenopoulos pursued a creative path from an early age, attending drama school, and later New York University’s four-year ﬁlm and television course, where he learnt the ropes of writing, shooting, editing and directing. “It was an amazing time to be in New York. A few years before that you got mugged walking down the road; then a few years later you couldn’t even party after midnight, with [former Mayor] Giuliani cleaning it all up.”

After returning to South Africa, he soon learnt the many fascinating ways a feature ﬁlm can end up not being made, and began subsidising his ﬁlmic ambitions with corporate videos for the likes of South African Airways. This was the mid 1990s. The internet was starting to be a thing. “I thought if we are making these corporate videos it would be better making websites, so I went to the company, and they said, ‘we don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, but here is our client list, here’s a desk, if you can make it work, then so be it’,” he laughs. “It was the right thing at the right time.”

While the industry around him saw digital as just another channel to add to the pile, Xenopoulos knew it was much more. “I knew it would fundamentally change the way that consumers interact with brands. It was a redeﬁnition of the dynamic.”

One Source, many platforms

By the time he started Native in 2010, the three career strands of digital, advertising and ﬁlm had come together in one elastic whole. A couple of years before, he had set up 2.0 Media, “where we tried to ride this line between advertising and entertainment” but found himself still focused on TV ads when he knew the biggest gap in the market was digital. So with the help of a designer, a tech wizard, and a social media specialist, Native was born, merging with WPP to become part of the VML network just two years later. Game-changing adventures in branded entertainment followed, ranging from big production pieces to small but incredibly e ective social media campaigns such as I Am Muslim and Refugees – “branded messaging in a social context,” Xenopoulos calls them. “To change perceptions and behaviour. That’s really important, for all of us.”

One Source is probably Native VML’s most ambitious piece of branded entertainment, made in collaboration with Absolut. A multimedia piece that travelled the continent, it featured South African rapper Khuli Chana, Kenya’s Victoria Kimani and Ghana’s Sarkodie in a pan-African musical celebration of Africa’s cultural renaissance. “The work we’ve done with One Source is predicated on the fact that there is a real renaissance and cultural revolution sweeping across the continent,” says Xenopoulos. “It’s not an advertising notion but the reality of what is happening. One Source is creating a platform for all that stu . We turned it into an album, a pan-African collaboration,

“I knew digital would fundamentally change the way that consumers interact with brands. It was a redeﬁnition of the dynamic.”

“Unless you’re building your brand into the fabric of either the content or service that people want, you’ve got no hope.”

a music video, documentary. And now we’re launching One Source Live, a festival of African creativity, of music, art and fashion. We’ve pitched it as a gathering of African creative revolutionaries, and the intention is that it will grow and get bigger and bigger.”

Branded experiences such as this reverse the paradigm of artists signing with brands to endorse them. Instead, brands are now starting to support artists – “becoming the Medicis of popular culture” as Xenopoulos terms it. “Unless you’re building your brand into the fabric of either the content or service that people want, you’ve got no hope,” he says. “The days of buying an audience are dwindling fast. You have to create something of value. What we need is real partnerships between brands and culture creators, to create art and entertainment that has a brand built in to it at a completely di erent level.”

The president declares these minds open

Is this the sort of work he wants to see at Dubai Lynx, where he’ll be president of the Branded Content & Entertainment jury? “I don’t want to go into it with preconceived ideas,” he replies. “Rather, I want to let the work tell us what branded entertainment is, and where it’s going. It’s at a shifting point in its life cycle so that every day there is a new work coming out that makes you say, ‘wow’, that’s what is possible. So I would like us to go in with an open mind and let the work guide us towards a clear and consensual overview of what great branded entertainment is.”

And if his jurors do want to come armed with a good working deﬁnition, Xenopoulos has this to say: “It’s about creating content that is designed to meet the needs of an audience so that an audience will choose to watch it, share it, and then the brand builds itself into that. Everything we do at Native VML, we try to apply those principles. Our mantra is work that lives in people’s lives. We try to build stu that adds value to the audience as well as the brand, and ideally adds value to the wider world as well.” S

Trevor Robinson THE WAY I SEE IT

As founder of Quiet Storm, purveyor of ‘MindBombs’ since 1995 and the ﬁrst UK agency to marry production and creative, Trevor Robinson is all about explosive ideas. At HHCL, he slapped the world with the Orange Tango ads and went on to create and direct standout work for Martini, Yakult, Haribo and more. In 2009, he added to his many accolades an OBE for his services to advertising and his work on improving diversity in the industry. A storyteller at heart, he enthralls Carol Cooper with tales of a machete-wielding brother, a darkly funny mother, and a career spent balancing mild imposter syndrome with a quiet belief in his talents and a “‘let’s have it’, early-Oasis kind of feeling.”

“There was no security then; I’d just go strolling into St Martins and sit down at lectures.”

I’m not really like anybody in my family. I have three brothers and a sister. I’m the youngest. I’ve never met my oldest brother. He’s a farmer in Jamaica. He’s quite a notorious, machete-wielding landowner. If you stray onto his land he’ll chop you up! I’ve always imagined going to see him one day and he’d attack me and I’d be like, “I’m your brother! I need those limbs!” I’ve never actually felt a great compunction to meet him...

My brother Scott is a painter decorator/builder and a personal trainer too, and my other brother, Winston, is a lifelong repeat o ender. He’s just come out of prison. If you didn’t know our stories you’d look at Winston and think that’s the guy who’s in advertising. He’s charming, he’s goodlooking, he’s a nice guy. He’s o the drugs now, ﬁrst time I’ve seen him clean in years.

I grew up on the Notre Dame Estate in Clapham. I left home when I was 17. I stayed with a mate or at girlfriends’ houses. Sometimes I’d go back to stay with Mum if I ran out of money. But I’d invariably get a job after a while. At Tesco or wherever.

My mum died this year and I realise now that I’ve always been terriﬁed of her dying. I had a lot of time with her at the end. She wasn’t able to talk but she’d squeeze my hand and smile at me. I felt sorry for Winston, they let him out of prison once to see her. I’m sad for him he didn’t get that time with her.

I’m not religious. As a kid I’d look at people and think they seem so happy with their god! I wish I could get God. Mum would take me and my brother to white churches and to black churches. The black churches were funnier; you’d get the Holy Spirit arriving and women ﬂailing around on the ﬂoor. Me and my brother would be pissing ourselves laughing and trying to hide it. My mum would give us this look, but she’d be trying not to laugh too. That’s what she was like. People say I have a dark sense of humour; I got that from Mum.

My dad came over here from Jamaica and got himself a business together. He was physically strong and a really good-looking guy. People would say “your dad’s really cool”. He was kind of a leader. That was before he descended into booze. He was illiterate but a self-taught builder/electrician/ mechanic… everything. I suppose he just had to get on and do stu . He couldn’t a ord to have someone round to ﬁx the telly. How the hell did he ﬁx our telly? What did he know about tellies?

I can’t even ﬁx a cupboard in our house. It’s fallen o its hinges and I should probably try and go at it with a screwdriver but I’m like, “I don’t really do that type of thing... I’ll get a little man round to do that”.

I’ve always thought part of my self-belief comes from the pride we had as a family. We had no right to be, but we felt a bit superior, kind of, “We’re the Robinson family. There’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mum and dad were divorced by the time I was nine. And my dad just disappeared after that. So Mum was a single parent, working night shifts. She was always strong. Nobody would mess with me at school cos of my mum and my two psychotic brothers.

I always felt sorry for Mr Gauche, my teacher. He had a big bunch of keys and when he was angry he’d yell and throw the keys at the blackboard. I was usually one of the mouthy ones sitting at the back, but I was up at the front one day when Mr Gauche got angry, miss-threw, and the keys landed on the back of my head and cut me. There was blood everywhere. My mum and brothers marched into school and my two brothers were either side of Mr Gauche saying “Mum’s gonna punch you now and there’s nothing you can do about it”. And she did.

Mum was funny. She’d tell great stories about my family in Jamaica. For extra money she’d get people in and do their hair and I used to draw her clients. Looking back, the drawings were rubbish; I made them look like monsters, but I’d show them to Mum and she’d go, “these are brilliant! You’re going to be an artist!” She’d show them round to her friends, who’d be like... ‘hmmmm’, but I was very conﬁdent cos of her conﬁdence.

I got myself in debt going to Hounslow College. I couldn’t get a grant. To get there, I used to forge train tickets and change the date on them with a scalpel. I used to bunk o a lot and go and sit in other colleges. There was no security then; I’d just go strolling into St Martins, or Camberwell and sit down at lectures. They’d set a brief and I’d do it and come back and present it and they’d say, “OK, who is this guy?”

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. My portfolio had fashion design, textiles, graphic design, illustration and advertising. But even at college the guys doing advertising were di erent to me, they dressed di erently and they were already a bit “ooh, we’re in advertising”. I never thought I’d get into it. I thought, that’s where the money is but, somehow I’m not allowed in that space.

At college back then, they’d just get the D&AD book and go, “right, do what they’ve done”. That did my head in. Every time I did that I thought, well, it’s not as good as the original because I’m trying to copy it. So, what is my version? Nobody seemed that bothered by personal visions.

I met Al Young at Samuel and Pearce, this little below-the-line agency in Richmond. We were doing leaﬂets for pile creams etc. It was demoralising. I was physically ill with colds and stu for a year. I eventually realised I was unhappy. My body was telling me to get out. I realised I really liked advertising though. We started meeting up with Tom Carty and Walt Campbell, who were at Dorlands at the time, to work on our portfolios at night.

Tom and Walt got a job at TBWA and after getting ﬁred from Samuel and Pearce, me and Al were on the dole again for about a year. At the dole o ce you see people so demoralised, so angry and so dehumanised. I remember seeing people get so frustrated they actually started to take their clothes o . It really struck me. You never see that in the workplace; people getting angry and getting naked, saying, “I fucking hate this! Here are my clothes! Here, I’m throwing my knickers at you!”

People just didn’t want to give me and Al jobs. We didn’t look right; we made people feel uneasy; this black guy and a stammering Scotsman. Eventually we got a placement at TBWA, we only had two weeks there but we won them some business. Then Tom and Walt bludgeoned their boss Murray Partridge into giving us a job. Tom just walked into his o ce and said, “give those guys a job. Give ‘em a job, Give ‘em a job. Give ‘em a job,” like that Ben Kingsley character in Sexy Beast. I think Murray didn’t really like us. Looking back, I feel a bit sorry for him. He was this lovely middle-class guy who just wanted nice people around him, and we were a bit rowdy; playing football in reception, etc. We were a bit much.

“At college the guys doing advertising were di erent to me, they dressed di erently and were already a bit ‘oh we’re in advertising’. I never thought I’d get into it.”

Me and Al came from the clubbing era, ﬁve days a week we’d be going out and staying up all night and coming into work the next day with our eyes bleeding; falling asleep under the desk. We had that ‘let’s have it’, early-Oasis kind of feeling. Sort of ‘this is me, I can’t change me, so I’m going to embrace it’. I’m getting more like that actually.

I’d been like a street kid. I used to ﬁght a lot. It was only at college I realised nobody fought. If you disliked someone at college they’d just bitch about you. I didn’t know what to do with that. I was like, “Oh, he doesn’t like me, that’s why he’s being like that”. Then I realised it was the same in the ad industry.

Worst days of my career? I gotta say; getting fired is not the best thing. I was fired from my first job at Samuel and Pearce – quite rightly. The boss pulled me aside and said “I’m gonna give you some money and let you go.” He knew I was working on my portfolio at night and using all their equipment and stu . It was a nice firing. The most soul-destroying one was when Murray Partridge fired me and Al. It was a Friday and he was standing there holding onto the door and he says, “I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to let you two go”. Al didn’t quite get it; he said, “what d’you mean?” and Murray, who found us a bit intimidating, started backpeddling a bit, saying “well, maybe you don’t have to go right now... You’ve been

doing really good work... maybe you can stay.” He started talking himself out of it. And I said “Murray, you don’t mean that. You want us to go don’t you?” And he said, “yes I do really”. So we were on the dole again for a year and a half before we started at Howell Henry.

Being back on the dole was di cult as we were almost, but not quite, a middleweight team, but we couldn’t get a job on a placement either. We were taking our book around and we’d change it to suit the style of whatever agency we were seeing. But then we met Graham Fink who pointed out we needed to be doing work for ourselves; to develop our own style. That changed everything.

“I thought people will look at me and think, ‘actually, this guy from the council estate, we didn’t think he’d do well, but he’s done all right, let’s have more of that ﬂavour’. But they haven’t.”

“The [ads] are based on a guy we knew who’d take days o work to stay at home and have a wank.”

Al and I shared a very dark sense of humour and that showed in our work. In a way, Tango came out of us taking the piss out of the cause-and-e ect concept of advertising; “drink this and something pleasant will happen to you”. We thought, “what if something really unpleasant happens to you when you drink it?” We were laughing about all these horrible things that might happen. Something you hadn’t noticed. Then we had the idea of rewinding to see what the horrible thing was. We thought the client’s never going to buy into this.

The Tango ads were all about a very British humour. We grew up in that Monty Python/Spike Milligan era of surreal comedy. Some of it was quite racist; I used to think I shouldn’t be laughing at this cos it’s derogatory to me and my kind but it was also funny and had a touch of punk about it.

Probably the work I’m most proud of is the apple Tango Seduction campaign. Not so much cos of the ads themselves, but because of the story behind them. They’re based on a guy we knew who’d take days o work speciﬁcally to stay at home and have a wank. We used to crack up imagining what would happen if his wife came home and caught him at it. The fact that we got that story out as a commercial makes me laugh. The only bit that got banned was a scene when he put down a box of tissues.

I’m a real ﬁlm head, I get obsessional. I watched and it blew my mind. Then I watched it again straightaway without the sound on. I could hear it still in my head but it allowed me to see how it was cut; what scenes drew me in etc. If you turn the sound o it allows you to see a ﬁlm in a

I think being given advertising briefs is a lot easier than being an artist and having to drag something from your soul; from a blank canvas. Advertising is a fun thing to do if you strip away the whole manipulation and propaganda and getting people to buy stu they don’t need

With ads I like to get a bit of psychological truth in there. I got this from Tom and Walt – when they did a shoot they’d leave a bit of time for improvisation, to get the actors to explore and ad-lib a bit. In the latest Moonpig ad I got the actor playing the father-in-law to say, “I hate you” to his son-in-law, it summed up how he really felt about the guy who was shagging his daughter. We all laughed and the client was like, “but Moonpig isn’t a hateful brand.” We had to ﬁght to keep it in, but that’s the bit that people like and remember.

My brain works in a very William Burroughs, tangential sort of way. I ﬁnd it hard in presentations to read out my own words in a linear fashion, I like to improvise really. That’s why I need planners. But sometimes really organised people are like robots hitting walls. I see advertising people giving TED talks and they always seem more crafted in what they say. My wife, who’s MD here [Rania Robinson], always says “you sound a bit shit actually.” I just like to say what I’m feeling.

Quiet Storm is doing really well and we’re hiring and expanding, but at the same time I have that fear about Trump and Brexit and so on; about how money is shifting away from advertising, going to all these new, sterile, in-your-face mediums… inﬂuencer marketing etc.

I was sitting on a judging panel the other day and I didn’t think I was bored at the time until these little vignettes for EuroMillions lottery [Nicer Problems to Have] came on. They were old-fashioned ads that were funny. We realised it was the ﬁrst time in two hours we’d laughed. Before that people were going, “hmm this is really good because it gets people interacting/or it changes colour, or blah blah blah.” It became obvious that we all craved a bit of entertainment. Something that gets you in the gut so you remember the product, something you like, so that you like the brand for bringing it to you.

Is marketing getting too clever? You know; your retina gets read when you walk into a shop and you end up buying a handbag you didn’t want.

Some people say that the industry is getting more diverse, but I’m not so sure. When I go to awards dos I’ll look around to see how many black people there are... and how many black women. You don’t see any black women. Unless they’re PAs or account people. This is shocking.

I don’t think many people mean to be out and out swastika-waving racists, sitting there in a KKK outﬁt saying, “oh, I don’t really think you should be here”. But what people do, when they want to choose a prodigy, is they look for versions of themselves, but younger. What happens in the industry is you walk into a room and people feel uncomfortable if you’re di erent. They just want to see their own kind; it’s a tribal thing. Once they get to know your personality it’s di erent, they feel comfortable and they kind of don’t see you as black any more. That’s when they say, “ohh, it’s not you, it’s them.” And once you’re in the ‘it’s-not-youit’s-them’ bracket you know you’ve arrived – they no longer see you as black. I’ve done it myself. I might be prejudiced against some teenager and think, ‘I’m not getting this person’. But then I’ll get to know them and feel di erently.

I didn’t feel comfortable at ﬁrst, being black and being in advertising. When we were working on Create Not Hate [an initiative Robinson set up in 2007 to get young people a ected by gangrelated violence into creative industries], I had to prepare young black people for feeling that. I said, “you will be the only black person in the room –they will feel uncomfortable and so will you”.

I feel a lack of diversity means we are missing out on some valuable people out there who could really make our industry jump again. I think we are doing such samey stu – it’s written by the same people, for the same people. Things need to be shaken up, people need to embrace not feeling comfortable.

I thought when myself and a few other black people began to succeed that it would be a springboard. I thought people will look at me and think, “actually, this guy from the council estate, we didn’t think he’d do that well, but look at him, he’s done all right, let’s have more of that ﬂavour in here!” But people don’t seem to think that way...

And yes, of course, work should always be given on merit. Nobody should be in a job unless they’re bloody good at what they do. I always feel I have to be as good – if not twice as good – as other people. I guess I still think that I am justiﬁed only by what I have just done, and how much money I’ve made for the client. My barometer is my brother coming round and saying “Trev, did you do that ad? That’s a good ad.” And if I can’t tell my big brother about an ad that I’ve done that’s any good – if he just shrugs, that’s it for me. That’s what makes me look over my shoulder.

“I don’t think many people mean to be out and out swastika-waving racists, sitting there in a KKK outﬁt saying, ‘oh I don’t really think you should be here’.”

The only brand I’d probably refuse to work on is the Tory party. They scare the bejesus out of me, even more than some of the more visibly rightwing groups – at least with them you know where you are. I don’t like the quietly bigoted, angry little people. I was once invited to this police commissioners’ banquet and it was like looking behind a curtain. I’d never imagined policemen as having much money, but there were these super-wealthy guys braying about their yachts and so on. They’d sat me on a table with the one other black person – a Baroness or something. She didn’t like the fact that I was put next to her; that we’d been lumped together on the ‘black people’s table’. A leading Tory politician was the afterdinner speaker and he started telling these horribly racist jokes. I’ll always remember the Baroness and I just looked at each other aghast – everyone else in the room was laughing. When the politician left the stage he walked past our table and he turned and looked straight at me with this smug, challenging look. It made me go cold.

I guess there are lots of things that you should say you shouldn’t work on cos they’re bad for your health. But so many things are bad for your health. There are probably loads of things we shouldn’t be selling. Maybe we shouldn’t be selling beans. We’re getting people to buy things that they maybe don’t need or want. I’ve got so many things that I guess I don’t need, but they make me feel good...

I get a bit wound up cos the process is so slow, I really want things to get moving. There are lovely people at the Creative Circle Foundation [Robinson is on the board of the awards body’s new, free ad school set up to get more diverse students into the industry] and the CEO Jeremy Green is such an inspiring man. But they want to take 15 kids into the school. I’d like to get hundreds in. I’m currently working on an afro visibility campaign; it sounds a bit trivial but it’s about black people’s hair and how some women feel they have to straighten their hair and be something they’re not. I grew up with this. Mum used to straighten

my hair, and use Betnovate [steroid cream for eczema] to lighten my skin. It was what you did to be accepted and it’s still going on. When you see women wearing weaves and wigs and so on, it can be that they’ve burnt o their natural hair to have straight hair. I’m a bloke and I’ve been a ected by it. I even had a fellow black guy in the industry, a nice person, say to me, “Trev, when are you going to cut your hair?” When she was younger my daughter said, “Dad when can I straighten my hair?” and she has this lovely lush afro. She’s nine now and a lot more conﬁdent about who she is. That’s cos me and her mum are always telling her she’s ﬁne, but society projects other ideas on to her.

I was thinking about doing the portrait for this feature, it made me look at how I perceive myself. It all feels a bit narcissistic. I suppose my story is that I’m a kid from a council estate who came into this industry feeling intimidated and that I shouldn’t really be here. I felt everyone was better than me. But then I realised… actually, I’m fucking good.

Founder & ECD, Brothers and Sisters

FAVOURITE KIT ANDY FOWLER

1 Parrot Swing drone

My little boy has become an expert pilot. We take it to the park on a weekend and he hones his skills. It’s made of polypropylene and looks ﬂimsy, but it’s survived a few tree collisions. It’s amazing how precisely you can control it. It ﬂies through the eye of a needle.

2 Nike+ Run Club

Running is my thing. Keeps me sane, keeps me ﬁt, keeps me on the streets. The guided run function is pretty ﬂipping cool. Mo Farah or Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge are in my ear the whole way giving me advice and motivation.

3 S’well water bottle

It looks me ages to get into the habit of putting it in my bag every day. Now I’m plastic-water-bottle-free. One less thing to feel guilty about.

4 Folk Protest Jacket

We created this original product in collaboration with Folk clothing. It allows you to write pithy slogans using the hidden mini-keyboard and wear them loud and proud on your chest. The slogan T-shirt for the protest generation. No offence Donald.

Favourite Apps/Podcasts

How I Built This

A good podcast where founders tell their stories. Ben and Jerry’s, Patagonia, and Instagram to name a few crackers.

Super interesting for anyone with an entrepreneurial streak. Like me.

The

Start

A new podcast from The Guardian, in which major artists reveal how they began their careers. Soﬁa Coppola and Damien Hirst are the ﬁrst two which ain’t a bad start. Plenty of serendipity, just like How I Built This.

5 Apple Watch

It buzzes and I know my phone’s ringing. There must be simpler ways of establishing this. Like turning up the phone volume. But that would be too easy. Why have one device when you can have two.

6 Under the Skin podcast

Russell Brand’s regular conversations on where power lies and how to take it back. Corporate power, meditation, conspiracy, addiction, religion. The big ones. I enjoy some of his rambling, eight-part questions that last about ﬁve minutes so by the time he shuts up the interviewee has no idea what to say.

I’ve just got back into the habit of doing 10 minutes of Headspace [mindfulness] before my kids wake up in the morning. It’s worth it, though I’ve a terrible wandering mind so I struggle like hell. One day.

I love this app for live music gigs in London. Basically the end of Ticketmaster and all those other shit ticket sites. Every gig in one place. Unbelievably easy to buy.

Headspace

DICE

OPEN FOR ENTRIES

- 8 March 2018 -

2018 Categories

Agency of the Year

Television Commercial of the Year

Over 60 seconds

New

Best Audio Company

Best Use of Animation in a Commercial

Television Commercial of the Year

Up to and including 60 seconds

New

Best Use of Emerging Technology

Best Use of Music in a Commercial

Best Use of Sound Design in a Commercial

Branded Entertainment of the Year

One-off project

Branded Entertainment of the Year Series

Charity/PSA Campaign of the Year

Online Commercial of the Year

Over two minutes

Online Commercial of the Year

Up to and including two minutes

Director of the Year

Editing House of the Year

Editor of the Year

Music Video of the Year

New Director of the Year

Production Company of the Year

Production Service Company of the Year

VFX Company of the Year

THOSE FILM WORLD FEELINGS

Olivia Atkins’ round up of new talents references a range of emotions – the joy of embracing a brief to just ‘get weird’; those lucid dreamlike perceptions when your camera goes ‘out-of-body’ and the immersive, split-screen sensations that convey how it feels to have ADHD

Elliott Gonzo

MUSIC VIDEO

Aneek Thapar Glow

Lucid dreaming, exploring story through dance and following raw instinct are some of the practices that self-taught director Elliott Gonzo uses to help him think outside the box.

How did you get into directing?

I’ve studied art my whole life and when I got to university, I decided I wanted to make sets, so I took a production design for ﬁlm course. There, I developed my personal directing style and started creating work to reﬂect this. It was around this time that I also got into researching lucid dreaming. I’ve since tried manipulating my dreams to inspire my cinematic work. I’ve also looked into various directing theories; to try and get a sense of di erent auteur styles and channel various elements into my own work.

What keeps you inspired and what do you love most about the creative industry?

Filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky are huge inspirations. I love watching ﬁlms that push the boundaries of cinema and o er viewers di erent experiences. Daily life also inspires me; I like to twist the world around me, taking all that is mundanely familiar and redesigning it into hyperreal scenarios. This is how I usually begin working on a short ﬁlm or music video.

The promo is a very sensual piece; talk us through the camera techniques you used to create the overall feeling.

The camera moves fluidly between movements and environments as if floating through a dream, almost from the perspective of an out-of-body experience. The camera moves in a way that mimics Aneek’s tone, which helps to bind all the narrative elements together. The overall intention was to create a seamlessly-flowing dream world.

What was it like using dance as a vehicle to tell the story?

This was the ﬁrst time I’ve used professional dancers within a project. I wanted to play around with physical movement to convey a storyline without using any words. In this ﬁlm, Benny’s ethereal dancing complemented the music perfectly and delivered the story in a way that words couldn’t.

Were you looking for any speciﬁc qualities in your actors and if so, what were they?

I’m usually quite instinctive when it comes to casting; I don’t always have a strict, preconceived list of requirements. It’s more to do with how I connect with an actor when we meet or if they can show me a side to the character that I hadn’t yet imagined.

What were the biggest challenges in bringing the ﬁlm to life?

Budget is always a challenge; it seems that no matter what it is, it’s never enough. But it does mean [you have to use] a lot of initiative.

On this job, you were the director and the editor. Do you enjoy having overall creative control? It varies – sometimes it feels essential to carry out both roles – especially if it’s a particularly unusual concept or I have a distinct idea for the narrative that could be hard to relay to someone. Other times though, it helps to have a second eye over it.

How would you like your directing career to go? Ultimately, I’d like to make a ﬁction feature.

What have you learnt so far as a director? That collaboration and trusting other artists is key. I don’t want to be precious about my visions.

“I’ve tried manipulating my dreams to inspire my cinematic work. I’ve also looked into various directing theories; to try and get a sense of different auteur styles.”

Filthy Animal

MUSIC VIDEO

Fizzy Blood

ADHD

The creatives behind We’re The Superhumans, Richard Biggs and Jolyon White, a.k.a. Filthy Animal, have waited their turn to try directing and their debut o ering – a VR promo expressing the condition of ADHD – doesn’t disappoint.

How did you come to make a Fizzy Blood promo? We’ve wanted to direct for a while but just needed to take the plunge. After talking to Agile Films, who loved what we’ve done as creatives, their MD, Myles [Payne], o ered to help us make our ﬁrst music video. Jolyon already knew Fizzy Blood’s manager through an Instagram page he runs (@vinylmonger) and they sent over a track for us. We’d seen Fizzy Blood’s videos on YouTube and even if they’re a little raw, they all have a great energy. It looked like they’d be up for anything we’d throw at them – we wrote the ‘rolling around in paint in Speedos’ scene there and then.

You’ve worked together as creatives for some years, at 4Creative and now at W+K; why did you decide to enter the world of directing and where did the name Filthy Animal come from? We’ve been fortunate to have been surrounded by great directors wherever we’ve worked. We were at Mother when both The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide and The Sacred Egg were in the creative department and we learnt a lot from them. Then, at 4Creative, we worked with great directors

like Rob Blishen, Neil Gorringe, Keith McCarthy and Alex Boutell. And seeing Dougal Wilson at work on the Paralympics campaign was an education. Je Low directed our ﬁrst campaign at W+K, and he literally sat us in the chair next to him for the entire shoot and walked us through everything. We started to think, ‘yeah, we could give this a go!’. As for Filthy Animal, we are just massive fans of Home Alone

How much has your experience as agency creatives contributed to your directing?

A shit load. First o , we have been on enough shoots to know our way around a set. So we didn’t feel like complete lemons [on our ﬁrst shoot]. Our agency background deﬁnitely helps us get to ideas that are simple and single-minded – we think any great music video should be able to be summed up in one sentence. But then we have to put on our ‘director’ hats and start to dig into all the details to craft something people actually want to watch.

“As a creative you come up with mad ideas that you look to a director to solve but as a director you think, ‘how the hell do you do that?’”

How did you approach presenting ADHD in a music video? It’s not a condition that is often depicted in the creative media. Mental health was a theme we spent a lot of time thinking about while working on the Paralympics campaign. That was incredibly inclusive of a wide spectrum of disabilities, but one of the things we struggled to portray in Dougal Wilson’s awesome ﬁlm were so-called ‘invisible’ disabilities. The problem is if you can’t see it, it’s very di cult to portray it in a visual medium. So we approached the promo in a di erent way. Instead of trying to show what it was like having ADHD, we wanted people to feel what it was like having ADHD. We did some research online, and a lot of people described it as trying to watch multiple TVs at once or trying to watch one TV but someone keeps changing the channel every few seconds. The lead guitarist of Fizzy Blood, who wrote the song, agreed that this was a good representation of how ADHD feels to him. So we went with it.

Why did you decide to add a VR component? And what were the di erences between the straight music video and the VR experience? The idea was always for the ﬁlm to be as immersive as possible, so transforming that into VR felt like a natural move. The guys at Happy Finish loved the project and agreed to help us out. Because of the split-screen approach, converting it into a 360°

“I love the awkward surrealism of Damien posing in all the different spaces juxtaposed with the upbeat music. We had a tiny, micro budget, but I believe limits inspire creativity.”

Jane Qian

GENRE So Much Light Full Body Mirror

Chinese-American director Jane Qian reveals how she got into directing despite a lack of encouragement to do so, and explains her quest to tell stories with substance.

How did you get into directing?

I’ve wanted to be a director since I was 12. I never wanted to do anything else. But growing up as a ﬁrst-generation Chinese-American woman, I was always told I couldn’t be a director because they were usually white men. I fell further in love with the job as I learned what it can entail, such as adding positivity and new perspectives to the world.

project made my proposition so much easier; I knew he had the discipline, strength, and mental awareness to stay in those positions for long periods of time, all while lip-syncing to the song.

What keeps you inspired as an artist?

I ﬁnd inspiration everywhere, emotionally through the works of other artists and I’m constantly inspired by my peers and collaborators. My DP always challenges me to have reason behind every shot. We shouldn’t do something just because it’s ‘cool’; it must convey meaning and feeling. You need people like that in this industry – people who aren’t afraid to be candid, who can push your creative limits. Only by being uncomfortable do you get to open yourself up to learn new things.

video was (relatively) straightforward. We love the fact that when you watch it in VR, it plays out as a di erent experience and there are lots of little moments that aren’t in the traditional music video.

What have you learnt so far as directors?

Storyboard as much as you can and, as clichéd as it sounds, preparation is everything. First ADs shout so you don’t have to. DPs make you look good. Always listen to your producers. Don’t be too proud to take advice. Gym managers don’t like you clogging the showers with fake blood and feathers.

What keeps you inspired and what do you love most about the creative industry?

Our inspiration is fuelled by a combination of jealousy and admiration. We often see great promos or shorts that we wish we’d done. But the beneﬁt of being in a partnership is that we get on each other’s cases. If one of us comes up with a shit idea, the other will say so. We are always pushing each other to get to something good. What we love about the creative industry is being surrounded by smart, talented and interesting people who make us look like we know what we’re doing.

Any other directing projects in the pipeline?

We’ve just shot our ﬁrst spot for Sainsbury’s which is exciting. We’ve also had a good reaction to ADHD so we hope to get more promo projects.

What was the brief that artist So Much Light approached you with?

[So Much Light singer] Damien Verrett didn’t give me a speciﬁc brief. He just wanted to get weird. And I love embracing weird.

What was the inspiration behind the promo? I was inspired by the works of photographer Ben Zank and director Femke Huurdeman. I love the awkward surrealism of Damien posing in all the di erent spaces juxtaposed with the upbeat music. We had a tiny, micro budget, but I believe limits inspire creativity.

Tell us about the production.

We ﬁlmed around 35 di erent setups all over LA. We shot one full day and a couple of hours the next. Because it was just the artist, the DP Jake Bianco, and myself, we were able to move pretty quickly. Everything went very smoothly!

How important was it to have Damien Verrett in the ﬁlm and what was it like directing him in such varied positions? I wanted to add the element of deadpan performance on top of the already awkward framing of each setup, so having Damien in the ﬁlm was crucial. Getting him into all these positions wasn’t hard. He’s a passionate rock-climber. Knowing that going into this

What have you learnt so far as a director? Not to rush things (with time comes knowledge and experience; cheesy, I know, but so true); to love and learn from failures (because it will make you more resilient); to know that it’s OK not to know the answers to everything and that you (as the director) don’t have to do it all.

You’re listed on the Free The Bid website. How did that acknowledgement come about? I was on Instagram and saw that Free The Bid posted a screen grab from the Full Body Mirror promo. It was very exciting because I’ve previously emailed them with no response, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to reach out again. I love Free The Bid and everything they represent. Founder Alma Har’el is a huge inspiration and hero of mine.

You’ve already done a couple of commercials, promos and even a short ﬁlm. What can we expect to see from you in future? I’ve got more into the documentary space this year. I love sharing stories of real people, particularly badass women who break stereotypes and are themselves when the world tells them to be someone else. There’s so much tension and unrest in the world right now; that’s why a lot of my work is rooted in reality. But I really want to get back into the narrative space.

Trade, Leak and Beard were the ﬁrst spots I did for Skittles, so I didn’t have a relationship with the guys [Ian Reichenthal, Scott Vitrone, Craig Allen and Eric Kallman] at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York yet, although I ended up doing a ton of work with them later, including Old Spice. At the time they’d done a few Skittles spots that people liked. Now everyone’s doing work like that for candy [brands], because Skittles became the voice for the entire category, but back then it was almost like – oooh, they’re trying too hard to be weird.

ON REFLECTION

Skittles: Beard; Leak; Trade

brought the darkness. The sadness of humanity is a space is where I ﬁnd a lot of juiciness. Trade, in particular, felt like some sprawling old folk tale. It gave us a licence to get twisted and mischievous.

One of the funniest things about Trade is that the voice of the rabbit was actually CD Ian [Reichenthal]. During production we got all these demos of people doing crappy opera singing. It sounded like a bad frozen pizza ad – all these guys trying to sound Italian. We went through days and days listening to this stu , until someone said, “You know, Ian

What excited me about those scripts – compared to what they had done before – was that they were all tragedies. They seemed really dark to me. Or maybe it’s just that I

Comedy maestro

Tom Kuntz looks back at the surreal series of spots he directed for the confectioner and recalls animatronic bunnies with warping mouths, beard puppeteers and hoisting a miniature dude high on a wire

was very funny when he did the voice in the meeting.” So we recorded it and thought... ‘that’s it’!

The rabbit was basically an animatronic rabbit with a lot of wires hanging out of its butt that we had to hide up the actor’s sleeve. Guys with joysticks wiggled them about to make the bunny look alive. There was a lot of work in-camera, though we ﬁnessed it in post. They did a lot of 2D warping on the mouth. But with this kind of comedy, when the CGI gets too good, it loses a bit of its weirdness and charm.

We shot it on the Universal back It was a three-spot package, so we shot the outdoor part in a weird little backyard of one of the houses that we made look really rural and crappy.

With the rain and the lightning, we wanted to go full horror. We had a rain machine. The poor bastard [playing the main character] was freezing, just standing around in the rain. We were shooting at four in the morning. Back then, I was a really irresponsible director and I would always do about 50 takes.

The first cut that my editor [Gavin Cutler] did is basically the version that went out, but at first he cut it so you saw the ending first. Then there was a rewind back to the beginning with sort of horror-movie music. I thought it was hysterical, but the agency thought we were out of our minds and it had gotten too dark.

The casting sessions for all those Skittles spots were brutal. You’d see maybe a hundred actors and be thinking ‘this is horrible’. Everything only comes together when you ﬁnd that actor who makes you jump up and down in your pants cos you’re so psyched to be bringing this thing to life. All of a sudden someone like the Beard guy would come in, and you’d think, ‘Oh, of course, he’s got to be a sociopath’. He ad-libbed the end line, “Ohhh, funny,” and we improvised the bit where he tosses the last Skittle into his mouth.

The same man who operated the rabbit, operated the beard. He was a puppeteer with a rod. We painted him out later in post. The beard was mine; I just shaved it o for the job!

The funny thing about Leak is that although it looks really basic, for the time, it was a real head-fuck to get right. In order for the little guy to be lifted to that height, we had to shoot him in a huge green room and he was basically picked up on wires pulling him left and right, and lifted 24 feet in the air. It was oddly complicated. That spot would’ve been funny just because [it featured] a miniature dude, but what’s really funny is the dynamic between the two. That’s what turns the comedy into something more sublime.

I did really like Trade; what appealed to me was the scale of it. Skittles’ ads were usually quite small-scale; this had a bigger swing. But Beard was almost the opposite of that – it was so strange and static. It was strong at the other end of the spectrum.

Those three ads were not really indulgent with the Skittles. We didn’t use that many. Not compared to how many we used in Touch

I wasn’t really surprised that the ads won awards. I knew they were good. I’ve never looked at the comments [under the ads] on YouTube, but if they really have entered pop culture that’s more surprising to me. People hate advertising. If and when our industry does produce something that breaks through, I think that’s really cool. But I think it happens a lot less than we think it does.