Once again, the Focus on Accessories-Series delivers. And once again Karl Lagerfeld is the only one credited on the creative side. I still have some doubts about his involvement and assume he’s some kind of creative supervisor. Really, it’s a pity we don’t get to know the other creatives behind those Chanel films. If you watch closely, you can spot a camera flash sometime. That could be Karl’s…

The Spring Summer-Collection was inspired by Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad”. Fun fact: back then, Coco Chanel designed the costumes for Delphine Seyrig, the lead actress of the film.

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Agency: Fallon London
Directed by: Leila and Damien de Blinkk

It’s obvious that UK based French Connection is very keen on novel marketing strategies. It starts with their acronym, FCUK, which really wants you to misspell/misread it. FCUK was the first brand to use Chatroulette as a viable platform for brand communication and last month they launched Youtique, the first ever Webshop integrated in Youtube.
Beginning of 2010 they also started to release a series of fashion films for their man and woman collections. Something like two dozen films are already done, all of them starting with the voice of a french man, who declares: “This… is ZEY WOMEN” or (you guessed it) “This is… ZEY MEN”. Very charming, nouvelle vague like imagery and a great cast (like Franco-Spanish rising star Astrid Berges-Frisbee, who will be appearing in Pirates of the Caribbean 4) makes for a lot of fun watching those. But it’s not just pretty people in pretty clothes. They got everything right: a well-thought out concept, good scrips, suprisingly good direction by photographers-turned-directors Leila and Damien de Blinkk and a “viral potential” on top of that.
Spring/Summer was all black and white, the new Fall/Winter season was shot by cinematographer Edu Grau (of “A Single Man”-fame) in color. You can check all of the films on FCUK’s youtube-channel.
Let’s hope more fashion brands show some of this boldness and commitment in embracing the great new opportunities that online communication has to offer.

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Director: Paul Gore
Editor: Matt Nee
Production: Flynn Productions

UK’ premier online fashion retailer kicks off BLACK, a new menswear collection, with this very intriguing film. Music video veteran Paul Gore has already directed some nice commercials, mostly beauty- & perfume-themed, but I think this one for Asos is his first straight fashion film, yet. And in my opinion, it’s also by far the most avantgarde and interesting commercial he has directed.

Also brilliant editing by Paul Gore, who is a freelancer with Flynn Productions. The letter is a very innovative film production company based in London, which recently also launched a fashion film division. The “Iris”-film I posted few weeks ago was produced by them. So be sure to to check them out.

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With H&M, it seems like business as usual when it comes to clever marketing. So, here we go again with a very stylish and simple campaign for their new designer collaborations coming 9th September. Their goal is obvious: all over the net the buzz is on and everyone’s guessing which designer is on board.
What’s unusual here, is that they didn’t use to start campaigning as close to the release date of the actual collections. Also, there is nothing else but the films. H&M has gone true viral with this one, and one week before the official start in the stores new films are still pouring in.
Here are only two examples, you can watch the rest of them on H&M’s own youtube-channel.

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Witchery Fall/Winter 2010. Beautiful girl, handsome boy, nice melancholic score, shot on film stock, black&white… It’s no witchery at all. Still, it impressingly captures that nouvelle vague feeling. Director is Kiku Ohe.

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