But it wasn’t always like this. Nick Knight’s first forays on SHOWstudio definitely did not look like ads. ‘Sleep’, from 2001, is a series of 8 ‘unconscious fashion performances’, composed of webcam stills of models sleeping in couture gowns and full makeup. The entire night’s sleep was streamed live on SHOWstudio at the time, if you wanted to tune in and see top models doze (or pretend to, at least) in a hotel in New York. This was something entirely new. This was nothing like an editorial in a magazine. It was a whole different category of fashion media.
Slowly, brands and designers began to get with the programme and dabble a little in fashion film, and in 2008, the movement reached its anticlimactic apogee with Trembled Blossoms, an animated film by Prada. Journalists and celebrities from around the world were brought to Prada’s store in downtown Manhattan to watch the four-minute film, in which a blank animated nymph is born from a drop of honey, puts on a pair of Prada heels and slopes around a colourful forest as other, more fashionable magical nymphs clothes her in new-season cartoon Prada. She comes to a forest gargoyle sitting by a pond and feeds an apple to a fish, who then turns into a new-season Prada bag. The whole thing was soundtracked by CocoRosie. I would love nothing more than to have been a fly on that wall, as slightly-bemused fashion-types attempted to find something to say about the strange and slightly sexual little film
Trembled Blossoms seemed far from fashion film’s original incarnation, but there’s nothing wrong with developmental distance. What was strange about Trembled Blossoms is that it was an ad that wasn’t an ad. It was designed by James Jean, the same comic artist who designed Prada’s eerie fairy illustration prints that season, but the connection between the film and commerce was almost intangible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOGNyV9ngMk
Perfume ads get a lot of flack, but when they work it’s because they give us a certain mental associations before we get the sensory smell experience – as an example, David Lynch’s ad for Gucci by Gucci, in 2007 featured three wealthy-looking supermodels dancing in a spooky and lavish house in LA. From watching this we can assume that the perfume represents money. We know this before we even get to smell it. What is the function, then, of a film like Trembled Blossoms? Granted, it does form part of a brand’s overall aesthetic, but something gets lost on the way to the viewer.
