there’s no (product) place(ment) like home
Do you remember the Littlewood’s Christmas ad from last year? You know the one. The nativity scene, with the annoying children and all the ugly, expensive products shoehorned in for bad measure. Remember how bad and cheap and shameless it all felt? We get it Littlewood’s, you sell loads of stuff, no need to rub it in our faces. All that means this ad from Fab.com must be horrific, right?
Wrong. It’s actually really clever and pretty amazing (clamazing?). Chances are you’d never have heard of Fab before the ad and you almost definitely had no idea what they did. Even if you knew they were an online shop you still don’t know much at all. In that case, the visual product assault works. There might be a touch of double standards because I’m a sucker for this sort of designer stuff but it doesn’t half help that their stocklist looks great. Heavily edited stuff works for me too.
fun fact : Fab started life as a gay networking site, says FastCompany
Diesel part deux/douze
I’m going to start by saying that I like Diesel’s branding. A lot. I don’t think I’ve blogged about any other brand half as much. They do cool stuff and I can’t deny that. Well, they *did* cool stuff. Their SS12 campaign was a little underwhelming but I held out hope only to end up disappointed. Their latest campaign, however, is bad. Real bad. Blog post bad. Compared to previous campaigns, such as BE STUPID or Diesel Island this season is a complete non-event. I don’t even know where to begin with just how bored this campaign makes me.
The top image below was the first I saw and it got me excited. I’m a sucker for a picture grid and Coco Rocha does a great job at being just weird enough to grab your interest. It’s a solid ‘fashion image’ (shot by Steven Meisel no less [he's kind of a big deal]) but it’s far superior to everything else I’ve seen from the campaign. The second image of the guy pretending to sing is downright painful and the pair dressed in black is so try hard I don’t even. I want to like it but I just can’t bring myself to do it.
Sorry Diesel.
nineties nostalgia
This video is pretty much the greatest 90s themed music video you’ll ever see. The TLC + Madonna + Aaliyah nods already make for great visuals but the added aging, for lack of a better description really make it. In most other situations the artificial graining (well that’s what it looks like) and nineties style shots and editing just push is over the edge. An almost perfect video for a great song.
I might even make a picture grid of the allusions.
the thirteenth post of christmas
In the process of packing to go home for the Christmas I’ve had to finish off a bit of unpacking that I still haven’t completed. Going through a few boxes of miscellaneous items I came across a beautiful thing. It was a glossy, navy plastic bag (that feels relevant for some reason) full of pages I’d torn out of magazines during my year in Italy. I thought I’d already used most of the good pages in various ‘projects’ last year but I managed to find some amazing pages that I thought I’d share. Very much in the same vein as yesterday’s post though this time it’s much more excessive.
This first collection is by far my favourite. It’s from an Italian magazine called Max which I absolutely love. I even tried to get a subscription here in the UK but couldn’t. They have an iPad version which is pretty sweet; shame I don’t have an iPad. Anyway, I love this spread which translates as ‘for the love of sneakers’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a magazine spread that has ever made me want anything so much. I just think this is a really great ways to sell shoes in a less obvious way. It helps that I love high tops but I even want the socks. Good job Max!
Another one from Max and another spread I love. There are a few more shots that were on white background but I’m not so hot on them. Monochrome is/was massive in Italy and it’s cool to see it done (well) in something other than black. Again, I think this does a really good job at selling clothing in a less obvious way. In many ways it’s completely unnatural, the shoes mostly, but it still feels really easy, natural and effortless: in sort, Italian.
Last one is just a collection of shots that didn’t really fit with anything else. The pope picture is another work of Max and the bottom is Male Vogue (I have no idea what you’d really call it in English, Vogue Man). The guy on the Vogue cover is a moderately famous Italian singer. This is his only moderately good song though. The other two pictures are from supplements of weekend papers. The top right was from an amazing spread with an extravagant neo-Victoriana thing going on. The tiny picture is from a spread on futuristic knitwear (I shit you not) and was focused on a post-apocalyptic superwoman who looks like she was knitted rather than born. You can’t tell from the picture I’ve included but she has sick hair, which is kind of like mine, embarrassingly.
