Italy: The new fashion for film

Tell someone you’re going to Italy and they’ll mention pasta. Tell them you’re going to Rome and it’s the Colosseum. Tell them you’re visiting Milan and it’s all about fashion. The city is still the centre of the trend-setting universe and now Italian brands aren’t just pushing boundaries in the threads on the catwalk but in the methods used to advertise them.

Although Vogue is still its undisputed bible and photographers such as David Bailey and Glen Luchford continue to be revered for their work, fashion has been swept along in the digital revolution’s tide regardless. And as paper becomes an increasingly tough sell, designers have realised there’s more to the internet than stills photography, and have become enamoured with online films, says Angus MacDonald, who produced the Armani ads starring Cristiano Ronaldo and Megan Fox at Advanced Room and now works at Collateral Films. “They (the brands) realise that online photographs are nice but hey, video’s a whole lot more exciting. It’s an interesting time.”

Videos in vogue Federico Pepe, creative director at DLV BBDO Milan agrees. “In the digital world it’s much easier for brands to build their profiles by making a video than just putting up a slide show. Why should you look at pictures one after the other? They’re for editorials. Editorials are going to die on paper. As magazines go digital people will read them on iPads and they are more likely to watch a video, not a slide show.”

Dennis Valle is SVP of digital marketing and communication for Dolce & Gabbana, whose core communication is now mainly based in digital. He explains the clients’ attraction to online films. “Through a video, brand promotion doesn’t need to be product-focused. It can be pure entertainment, not necessarily directly related to fashion. A video is able to evoke different sensations in a few seconds – curiosity, anxiety, expectation, fear, surprise and happiness. It can make you cry or make you laugh. The most beautiful and refined photographs can be understood and appreciated by just a few connoisseurs, on the other hand millions of people can enjoy a video production.”

D&G is one of several fashion brands leading the way in the new digital approach. Last year’s viral campaign for the launch of Martini Gold (a special edition of the vermouth made in a collaboration between the two brands) was fronted by a Jonas Åkerlund-helmed film starring Monica Belluci and featuring cameos by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana themselves.

Then came Miss Sicily, a short film produced by creative studio abstract:groove detailing the love that goes into one of the label’s handmade bags. It was originally intended for the web but its success persuaded the brand to put it on TV. Vale describes the digital-leads-TV process as “the natural evolution of these kind of projects”.

Freddy’s The Shadow Project (creative directed by BBDO’s Pepe and pictured above) lets viewers see the sports/ fashion brand’s entire SS2011 range almost subconsciously. It’s like a magic trick, using the film’s narrative to distract from the costume changes in each scene, thus preventing it from looking like a glorified look book. Freddy is one of the biggest employers of this method, with other notable Italian players including Gucci and Replay.

Stepping into a new realm of advertising, it’s important for brands to retain their identity within the tone of these online films. A sure-fire way of achieving this is to employ a fashion photographer to direct, and the best in the business are queuing up to do it. With the technology available they can shoot both still and moving images using the same kit without degradation in quality, and when using the Red camera, it’s possible to shoot solely video and take stills from it later. Even better news for the client is that photographers who have little experience in directing come a lot cheaper than they would for a traditional still shoot. World-renowned fashion photographer Paolo Zambaldi is one of the pioneers keen to explore moving images and has recently directed The Club for Freddy.

So make a video, post it on Vimeo and wait for the clothes to fly off the rails, right? Wrong, says Pepe. “A single film that you upload to the internet is there, but it’s just there floating. It doesn’t mean people will see it, so the strategy to get it seen is as important as the creativity in digital. Everybody wants to do digital but not everybody knows how to do it.”

Finding the audience online

Vale explains how D&G tries to cover all bases: “Our digital strategy is 360 degrees. At present we’re using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and a customised YouTube channel. Moreover we’re building our digital communication through other social networks like Foursquare, Sina, RenRen and Vimeo.”

And he sees the future for fashion advertising as pushing digital to its limits. “There is an evolution from a typical communication based on ‘information on the brand’ to a new communication based on the ‘experience of the brand’. It’s not only important to see the dream on the catwalk, on the web, in newspapers and magazines. People want to live the dream, they want to be inside of it. They have to feel it on their skins.”