The Weekly Roundup (week of 1.22)
Marc Jacobs and Michael Cera show yet again that the "found footage"/paparazzi trend is here to stay
1. Marc Jacobs by Yulya Shadrinsky
Bets are being placed for this year’s biggest marketing trends and my money is on this specific style of found footage/paparazzi/lo-fi surrealism. If I see another CGI/AI video from a brand I’m gonna send hate mail to their CMO. The first brand to the punch was Bottega Veneta but I like the way Marc Jacobs and Juergen Teller recently deviated more uniquely for a 40th anniversary celebration campaign. Even lotion brand Cerave hopped on the trend with Michael Cera. Included in the Marc Jacobs campaign were videos from Art Director Yulya Shadrinsky, who created these bizarre dreamlike shorts for the esteemed brand. My personal favorite is a clip she did for Marc Jacobs a few months ago in October.
Step aside CGI, this year we’re doing lo-fi surrealism.
2.‘Barbie,’ ‘Saltburn,’ Louis Vuitton: When Culture Becomes a TikTok Craze
“Fashion houses seemingly no longer hire creative directors for their design skills or aesthetic vision but for their marketing prowess. “The marketing guys frankly have invaded the companies,” Sidney Toledano, the former chief executive of Dior, said recently. This explains why there is less creativity on the runway and the most high-profile appointment in fashion last year was the rapper and music producer Pharrell Williams. In June, Mr. Williams presented his first men’s wear collection for Louis Vuitton, which, while confident and commercial, lacked “any new shapes, or ways of addressing the body, or thinking about luxury,” as the fashion critic Cathy Horyn put it. For Louis Vuitton, however, the show was an unqualified success: The star-studded spectacle attracted over a billion online views.”
A good piece about some of the more empty viral marketing campaigns this year from the NYT. Read here.
3. Can Everyone Be a Tastemaker?
This was a cool profile on the popular newsletter
which I’ve been a fan of for a while now. Funny enough I’m writing a piece about how the world desperately needs tastemakers and curators to return in a big way. Anyways, check out their NYT profile here. If you haven’t heard of them, they basically get the cool kids in NYC and occasional celebrities like Ayo Adebari and Michael Imperioli to drop a few of their favorite things. And when I say things it can be anything from clothes to fragrances, to books to advice.4. THE ART OF DESIGNING CLOTHES FOR SCREENS
In a technology-obsessed world, virality is the new currency when it comes to fashion. Social media can skyrocket a brand overnight. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest have long played a big role in creating trends and building brand awareness, but it really wasn’t until the TikTok boom that brands started to seek out their own ways to achieve virality.
This piece feels like it was written for 2022 but it’s nonetheless accurate. Very late, but true. Sorry I’m just salty that I don’t write for SSENSE. Read here.
