Human beings are visual animals. To get the picture means: we understand. But in order for someone to get the picture, we have to give him or her the picture. And let it be a good one. An original one.
There is one key decider if someone will get your picture: make it an original one. Because pictures that look like all the others, cliches, will not work.
A Visual Experience
We never buy clothing just because we like the look of them. We buy them because of the way they make us feel – as a human being. It is the experience that makes us connect to that clothing.
A fashion campaign creates a story, and experience, and attracts the people who are after this experience.
To give someone a clear picture of a fashion line is giving him or her a great experience. A story. A definitive world. Clothing isn’t just about not feeling cold or naked. It’s part of our identity.
Stories are Recipes for Experiences
A good fashion campaign goes beyond showing what the clothing looks like. It shows how if feels when you wear it. It charges it with emotion by telling a visual story and engaging the imagination of the audience.
If movies would be like many fashion images, the theaters would run Andy Warhol’s sleep, where you watch someone sleep for 5 hours 21 minutes, or “Empire State Building”, which is a single, 8-hour take of the high riser. And nothing happens, nothing nothing nothing at all.
I’m astonished how many brands photograph their clothing in an unemotional white background studio setting. This looks like a lab, this is a lab, with all the sterility and lack of emotion a lack a lab has to offer.
If movies would be like that, we’d watch five hour masterpieces of grass growing, paint drying, or someone sitting in a chair and digesting.
To tell a story, create an enticing environment: this is what creates emotions. A fashion image should be so enticing you wanted to hang it on your wall – because it spurs your imagination. You want to be there right in the middle of the picture.
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