Looking Into 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-Milan-Paris 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.

Gucci: Gucci and Beyond.

For the launch of the brand's 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.

Gucci: #TFW

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, 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.

NOWNESS: An Homage to David Bowie in Sound and Vision

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.

24 Sèvres: Where Fashion Comes to Life

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. 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.

Rag & Bone: Why Can't We Get Along

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 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.