Burning cars aren’t necessarily what comes to mind when you hear the name Bottega Veneta, but the Italian luxury house’s SS18 campaign offers a surprising (and cinematic) new direction for the brand.
First things first: there’s no photographer. Instead, the ads take the form of a film series called Reflections (if you were wondering how that’ll look in a magazine, it’ll be collaged stills which appear on the pages). Miraggio – that’s ‘mirage’ if your Italian isn’t up to scratch – is the first instalment of six, and debuts exclusively above. Featuring models Vittoria Ceretti, Aube Jolicoeur and Janis Ancens, sirens wail as a car, engulfed in flames, mysteriously rolls down the street of a deserted town.
“This is the first time I’ve worked on a big campaign without a photographer,” said creative director Fabien Baron, who collaborated on the project with the fashion house’s creative director Tomas Maier. “But we had a director of photography instead since it was film. And the rest of the team: hair and make-up, a stylist. But no photographer. We didn’t have that brand asset that most companies want – to be able to say my campaign was shot by such-and-such.”
But judging by the first film, it’s clear they didn’t really need that. Instead of the traditional ad, the clips present a dynamic way of approaching the fashion campaign – appropriate considering that Reflections centres on the idea of seeing things differently and from new perspectives.
“When you are shooting a campaign, there’s a desire to tell more of a story,” said Maier. “You are in an interesting environment with great talent, and the wheels start to spin. Who is this woman? What’s the man doing there? Whose house is this? Film now allows us to take the story further. To me it is always more interesting when a film ends and the plot could go one way or the other. It’s open to interpretation.”
Future episodes include the similarly mysterious titles Utopia, Rebirth and Vertigo, and promise to be just as cinematic. Stay tuned.
