Top Fashion & Beauty Secrets Revealed!

Adding Emotion and Relevance is the Key to Fashion Advertising

And getting it from every member of the production crew is key,
says a CD who's plied the fashion trade for top US retailers


By Anthony Vagnoni

Amie Valentine—could there not be a better name for a creative director working on a fashion account?—has been in the advertising equivalent of the rag trade for 20 years now.  She got her start in Minneapolis, working on advertising for Target, initially as a freelance creative, later on staff at Peterson Milla Hooks.  She spent ten years with the bull’s eye logo squarely in her field of vision before heading east to work on Kohl’s department stores at McCann Erickson.  Two years ago she was swayed by Saatchi CEO Kevin Robert’s high profile seduction of the JCPenney account—he wowed the client with his “Lovemarks” advertising manifesto—and joined the agency’s New York office to serve as Creative Director on the brand. She’s a Minneapolis native who now lives in rural Connecticut and loves working in New York—a bit of “cultural whiplash,” she calls it. “One minute I’m watching the deer in my backyard, and then I get on the train and I’m in the craziness.”  As part of our current fascination with all things fashion and beauty—check out our Special Feature on Fashion & Beauty Production here—SourceEcreative spoke with her about what it takes to pull off top apparel advertising these days.

What is it that you look for when you’re working with a director? Obviously they have to demonstrate experience in the category, but what else sells you on a director’s vision?

I think in this category there’s a unique challenge for directors, which is casting models. You have to go with those who are going to look good in the clothes. Even when you give strict parameters to the casting agency, you can still get actresses coming in thinking they have a model’s body and they don’t, or models who think they can act and they can’t.  But you need that combination, and it’s hard to find. You want models that look good in clothes, but you also want them to be able to emote. And directors need to know that they can take direction. You also want a sense of the type of person they are off screen so you can get that in their performance. Every director approaches it differently.

You can get some pretty girls who look fantastic in a print shot, but when they try and move or interact with other models, they're stiff.  On the flip side, some models can really project the fact that they're interesting people, too - the goal is to convey that dimension of them on the set. This is not like a catalogue shot, where you’re just presenting merchandise. You need to have a little bit of a storyline, too.

I had a casting session with the director Joe Roman of Knucklehead that really stood out. It was the longest call back session I’ve ever had.  He was spending so much time asking the models all these off the wall questions and I didn’t understand the method behind his madness. He'd say things like “think about the last time someone gave you flowers." Some of the models didn’t flinch, but then there were some that just crumbled. what i thought was an innocuous question revealed a real level of emotional vulnerability—I’d never seen a director do that in call backs.  He was asking them to remember important things in their lives as a way to break through a wall, and he did it.  It was an interesting lesson for me. And that’s one of the big things you look for in a director—someone who’s able to pull that unexpected dimension out of the right cast member.

Another director that does it really well is Matt Badger. I think his technique is invisible. His spots always turns out looking fun because people have actually had fun on the set.  You know, you just don’t want mannequins there, and it can be hard to get beyond that. The bar for how pretty these people have to be is very high, but you need to make sure you’re also getting their spirit, their vibe.

What is the main area of visual and creative influence for fashion advertising these days? Is it still the editorial layouts in the fashion magazines, places like that?

My first thought is that it’s anyone who shoots a Lady Gaga or Christina Aguilera video (laughs).

Do you feel that music videos still have an influence on fashion advertising?

Well, my whole source for information and video these days is the Huffington Post (laughs). I use that site as a topline culture filter, but I wish I had more time to see films. I think they’re a great source of inspiration.  If I could do my dream shoot, it would be with a woman named Miranda July. She’s a performance artist and a writer, and she directed my favorite movie in the last five years, “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” To put her with a great DP would be an interesting directorial approach—I know what it would look like but I don’t know what I would get, and I like that element of surprise.  My dream team would be Chris Soos as the DP and Miranda as director. I’d love to discover someone like that and give them their first commercial experience.

When you’re talking about music videos as an influence, there can be a lot of beauty and glamour in that genre, depending on who the artist is.  A director like Francis Lawrence (who's with DNA) probably gets a lot of beauty and fashion work because of his videos. I think a potential pitfall, tho, is looking ‘too cool for school’ when you go from the music video world to advertising; you need to add some humanity to it. One of my personal things is to have people touching or kissing in a spot—just to give it an element of life. Even though you’re adding the universe of fashion and style all around it, you need to put some real emotion in there. I think that connects you to a brand more. You want your message to be more than just ‘Oh, Target’s cool now, or JCPenney’s cool.’ you want to feel a deeper affinity for the brand.

You mention Chris Soos.  Let’s talk about the role of the DP in fashion advertising.

They’re your unsung heroes.  I think in this category they’re as important as the director.  And when you think about what’s happening with the advent of digital technology, I have to say that I’ve yet to see any RED work that looks good to me from a fashion standpoint. The spots that I’ve seen that have been shot on this look like a daytime soap opera.  I’ve also seen people working with the Canon DSLR—Joe Roman shot some stuff for us that we worked into one of our spots.  To me, that looks like the opposite of RED—more like what you’d get with a Bolex, with all these things you can’t control like you can with 35 mm. I remember someone saying—I think it was an editor—that you can’t manipulate the color grading as much when you’re working with the Canon. I actually like that, and I like the look of the Bolex as well. I’ve worked with Welles Hackett and with Mort Sandtroen and they both love using the Bolex—Welles even ginned the housing to screw up the film even more.

Basically to generate a distressed look?

Yeah, it’s kind of charming and lo-tech and interesting.  When Joe was using the Canon for one of our JCPenney Academy Awards spots, that’s the feeling I got from it. Then he brought in a great editor that he likes working with, Tim Thornton-Allen of Marshall Street. Some of my favorite editors are Tina Mintus of Cut + Run, Sloane Klevin of Union and Brett Astor of Channel Z in Minneapolis.  Brett had a lot to do with the look of Target editorially, she was really inventive.  Editing is so surgical in this genre. An editor has to know things like how the clothes are draping, frame by frame, or when the hair falls into the face and it's not pretty anymore. It really is often just a matter of shaving frames here and there to get it to look right. We’re consistently doing that, and it’s all for aesthetics.

Another area that plays a huge branding role in fashion work is music.  If you take the same cut and put different tracks against it, that changes things dramatically. A lot of clients want to sign off on the music track before the shoot, but I think it’s nice to be flexible. Your performances can change, the energy of the shoot can change from what you've boarded and if you’re not locked in to a track it kind of lets you go with it.

My favorite music house, hands down, is Hest + Kramer in Minneapolis and L.A. They have the amazing ability to make you feel you've heard the essence of an entire song in thirty seconds. It’s hard to do but Jim Weber and Steve Kramer there always pull it off. Steve was like this punk accordion player back when I was going to clubs in Minneapolis.

How about the role of the stylist?

A lot of stylists think their job is just applying fashion trends, but what I love is when they really dig in and familiarize themselves with the concept, and add any back-story to it and attach character attributes to the models.  It’s like, ‘Okay, this is the brainy girl in the back-to-school spot who’s into ‘80s music, or this guy looks tough but he’s really tender.’  It just adds more dimension to the final product. Again, it’s the whole thing of it not being a parade of mannequins, but rather something we can relate to.

What about shooting fashion for the web?  Do you feel you can get away with a different level of production value here?

I think brands like JCPenney want to be very engaging with what they’re doing on the web. The concept and production value should both be there. For me, it comes down to the practical factor—if you click on a site and there's a video playing at full frame, then it’s gotta look as good as it would on TV. If it’s not full frame, and you have more of a TV show content mentality around it, then you can get away with shooting RED or some digital system. But if it’s eye candy, then the bar is raised.  Digital's definitely the final frontier.


Published April 8, 2010.