Some more great stories from around the web surrounding all things fashion and digital over the past week:
Selfridges launches The Film Project with Alexander McQueen (as above), Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, Gareth Pugh, A.F. Vandervorst and Rick Owens [Karl is my Unkle]
Karl Lagerfeld launches new content-driven website [WWD]
Bergdorf Goodman partners with magazine app Zite to push brand-relevant lifestyle content [Marketwire]
Mr Porter launches global augmented reality fashion hunt [Mashable]
Nike showcasing ‘future of retail’ with pop-up Nike+ FuelStation in London [Creativity Online]
Gap launches new campaign integrating geo-fencing technology [PSFK]
In a recent interview with Dazed & Confused magazine, Gareth Pugh talked about fashion film as an add-on to a collection rather than a substitute. I love his thoughts around how it can capture concept and box up emotion beyond the existence of the line itself:
I think to have both is what I want to do next [published before his weekend showing in Paris] – so you’re communicating with an audience through a live show, and you have a film that is more about the world in which those clothes exist, which can be seen anywhere online. Show images exist online forever, but the idea that went behind that show is lost, and at the end of the day it’s bar-coded, it’s shipped out and it’s available to everybody. With the film, an emotion can live on forever.
His spring/summer 2012 film, created with Ruth Hogben and starring Crystal Renn, was shown in Paris this weekend, fused with the live catwalk show. Watch it here:
In the same interview, he also touched upon information-overload in the digital age:
I already feel quite separated from the generation below us because of things like Facebook, Twitter and blogging, which we didn’t have as teens. I don’t really get it. I think it’s too much, it’s an overload, and I don’t like that aspect of it. It means the way we live now is so much faster than it used to be. Before, with monthly magazines, a magazine would define what that month was. That’s the great thing about magazines – they are little bookmarks in time, whereas now, there’s no time to bookmark anything because it’s all happening in real time. But now you have so much choice, so much information – there’s so much to absorb. You just have to look at someone like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber – it’s just a phenomenon of the world in which we live, and it would have never happened before, but it’s amazing that things like that can happen at all. It’s like that stupid video on YouTube with that little kid biting that other kid’s finger – funnily enough, I was watching that video the other day, it has over 350 million hits. It bothers me that that can happen, but that’s just the way it is.
The Business of Fashion has revealed its top 10 fashion films of the season, with Prada’s spring/summer 2011 campaign leading the charge.
Also featured is Tom Ford’s spring 2011 show; Chanel’s robots in Here Comes The Beauty Pack; Gareth Pugh’s film from Pitti Immagine created by Ruth Hogben; and Seven Henrietta Street by Kate Spade New York.
Anatomy of Change for House of Mugler Menswear takes the number six spot – featuring tattooed “zombie” Rick Genest, with a soundtrack by Lady Gaga.
And rounding off the top 10 is Vanessa Bruno’s Miracle; Spying on Kate Moss, a film from on the set of the autumn/winter 2010/11 Balmain campaign featured on NOWNESS; Miu Miu’s The Powder Room; and Net-a-Porter’s Bag Guide.
Check them all out alongside the BoF’s full write up, here.
