Modern fashion photography creates emotions in audiences through visual storytelling. The audience experiences the world through the eyes of the character – and feels with him/her. These feelings transfer to the fashion in the story – fashion just soaks them up. The audience then wants this experience in their own lives and buys the fashion items in the story to ingest this feeling into their own, personal world.
In the following fashion story a powerful spell binds a wizard to a magic forest. He attracts a woman to free him with a kiss, but at a high price for her.
The Visual Story
The man lay in the forest and dreamed with open eyes. He could not move, nor could he get up. Months went by, and years, but the spell did not relent.
In a distant past he had fallen in love with a woman that turned out to be a witch. The moment he kissed her she wielded her dark magic on him, and he fell into a century long sleep.
Visual Storytelling in Fashion Photography: Aim for the heart, not for the wallet!
One day a girl entered the forest. She had heard a voice calling her name. She followed the voice to see what it was about and came to a small clearing.
There she saw a man lying on the ground. He looked beautiful, like a prince, calm and gentle. So she fell in love. She spoke to him, but he wouldn’t wake up. She grabbed his hand, and he opened his eyes.
her heart jumped violently in her chest as he got up and looked into her eyes.
They both had that very special glow in their eyes as they walked towards each other.
A cry of warning out of a distant corner of her consciousness told her to turn and run, but she was in love and stepped closer.
They embraced. They kissed. Her emotions carried her as high as the clouds and the sparkling sun.
But then she felt a weakness come over her. A tiredness. She fell.
A shadow fell on herself. There was a witch standing over her, whispering to her that she would have to stay. Forever. Until she caught a man and made him kiss her. And when she looked she saw that the witch was herself.
And the man, he’d almost been a boy, had changed, too. His face was tough now.
He towered over her and looked down from his powerful height.
“I turned into a wizard”, he said,”Just as you became a witch. You are going to sleep for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Until you will find someone to take your place.”
He turned away and she heard his footsteps disappear among the trees. She looked up in the treetops in which the rays of the sun and the birds of the forest played. She heard the gentle passing of years like rustling leaves, and began her long, long sleep.
Visual Storytelling Creates Emotions for Fashion
Humans do not buy rationally, but emotionally. Buying is ingesting things into our lives. We much prefer to buy fashion we have good feeling for. No simple ad can deliver those feelings.
Feelings are created by imagination when people watch and experience a story.
Charging Fashion with Emotions
I just came back from a trip to Europe: Vienna, Firenze, Milan, and Paris. On that trip I wore new jacket. When I came back, that jacket was steeped with the emotions of that trip. It was my Europe travel jacket. Whenever I wore in LA, my imagination took off for distant places.
It is like listening to music. We all have those pieces of music that when we listen to them they take us back to a time of a great emotional experience and we feel that feeling again.
This is how emotions work. They transfer to things (becoming souvenirs and talismans) and music.
You charge a new fashion collection or a whole fashion line with emotions the same way. People buy the fashion to acquire that experience and feeling.
More on Visual Storytelling and Creating Emotions:
If you liked the story, here is further reading in regard on how you can build story and emotions in your audiences – so they become emotionally involved with your brand: https://blog.robertwildephoto.com/charging-fashion-with-emotions/
To look at other images from other stories, you can go here: https://www.robertwildephoto.com/
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