Alpine’s song “Hands” is a very subtle and soft song formed by high delicate female vocals. Clearly, Luci Schroder has succeded in transporting the song’s atmosphere into the video imagery. Nothing but pastel colors, lovely & dreamy & very girly girls sprawling on the floor and just hanging out. Schroder chose a decelerated and softened CANADA-like vignette-film-approach (like in El Guincho’s Bombay) by arranging images full of absurd actions. The result is a music video leaving a warm but yet bewildered feeling behind. Admittedly, the girls licking themselves and huddling up seems a bit over-staged and out of place, but somehow the video as a whole manages to get away with it. Lovely!
Lara Stone goes Mary Poppins in this branded film directed by Alex Prager. We already featured the director with an earlier film, which, by then, won her “Best Artistic Direction” on the third edition of Diane Pernet’s Fashion Film Festival “A Shaded View On Fashion Film”. Well, that’s history.
Normally, we don’t goof on films we don’t like. Simply because fashion film is a field where many young professionals are making their first steps and most productions are hindered by small budgets and a lot of other compromises.
It’s a different thing with this film. There is a big budget, good talent, massive visibility… And we get a lousy idea, superstatic imagery, really, REALLY bad acting, not so impressive visual fx, … I could go on and on. Really, it’s a shame and a disgrace for the brands and the creatives involved with this film. Or would be, if you’d had any expectations regarding the creative level of this “fashion film” (and yeah, that also includes you, dear NOWNESS, once haven of the cool&avantgarde). I mean, why not, you can also aim for average. And branded average, that’s what this is.
To end this rant with a bright note, though: the coloring is quite outstanding.
Eventhough Barnaby Roper‘s piece for the Australian accesoires brand Maniamania was launched quite a while ago (in February 2011), we just had to feature it…Why? Well, because, first of all, our collection of Barnaby’s body of work on Ravished wouldn‘t be complete without it (see also Vanitas, Pauline and Iris); secondly because of Abbey Lee (duh) and finally because, even if we normally aren’t very keen on the overly-excessive use of effects, this film continues what Barnaby (resp. his cutter and post-guys @ Industrial Color) started with Iris: the exploration of the slice-effect. However, the result is a very fast paced and quite entertaining film inspired by „Vali Myers, an Australian artist and vagabond gypsy who roamed around the world as a free spirited dancer in the underworld of a post war Paris, then later becoming an artist and muse to many icons of our time, such as a young Patti Smith and Mariane Faithfull.“
Very haunting piece by film&art-director duo 1:2:3 for the Swedish label Minimarket. In retrospect, if feels like Fever Ray’s excursion into darkness with her solo debut a few years ago kind of kicked off (or at least helped to shape) a very unique aesthetic style. It mengles goth elements with nordic archaic ones, but also has a very psychedelic and esoteric style - in music, but also in design, fashion and everything else. This film is a perfect example of that particular style and we think it’s a very successful one. Last but not least, the very good musical contribution by Goran Kajfes & David Österberg helped a lot. It should be also pointed out, the directors are not only about being arty and showing off their visual imagination, but also manage to find an interesting and creative way to incorporate a lookbook character into the film.
The directors made another one for the follow-up-collection, for which they kept the esoteric undertone, but got carried away towards a moremediterranean mysticism…
WeSC collaborates with the hotel chain The Standard and features the Miami-based artist collective Friends With You in this piece. The Standard of course provided the location, Friends With You the blob-ballon-toy (or what should we call it?) and Miami the nice weather and the even nicer girls. The result is an over-the-top feel-good, sometimes quite absurd but always delightful escape to a dreamy&warm&sexy place…
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