Posts from — February 2010
Burberry – Catwalk to Credit Card in 15 minutes.
If you had your ear to the ground at around 4pm last tuesday, and were listening very very carefully you might just have heard the faint sound of the start of a revolution. It wasn’t Burberry’s groundbreaking use of 3D streaming – innovative and exciting certainly, but an evolution of what’s been happening for a while. It was something altogether different, and much more radical.
The real news from Burberry was that you could buy the shearling jackets online immediately after the show – from Catwalk to Credit Card in minutes. True, you do have to wait a few weeks for delivery (I did say the start of a revolution) but the point is that you could buy instantly. It seems like no big deal in this ‘click here for next day delivery’ world, but it could well mark the start of the biggest shake-up of the fashion system in decades.
The purpose of the fashion show is to showcase garments to buyers and fashion editors. The buyers pick the lines they want to stock, and the fashion editors decide what they will feature in their magazines. In the six months following the shows the magazine stories are shot and the garments produced. Historically, the public wouldn’t see any images of the collection until about six months after the show.
The system has worked well for years, but the internet, and to some extent our obsession with celebrity has thrown a spanner in the works. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it started (style.com‘s archive goes back to 2000) but images of the collections began to appear on line immediately following the shows. I have a suspicion that the public was really interested in the celebrities attending the shows rather than the clothes, but either way no-one is willing to wait six months to see the latest from their favourite designer any longer.
Once people have seen the collection though, they are going to ask the obvious question: why they can’t buy it? If you look inside the fashion system, you’ll see a whole load of good reasons why it’s built around the six month cycle; but no matter how good the reasons might be, it’s not something that the consumer will tolerate for too long. Burberry’s genius is to be the first to subvert the system and offer instant gratification. True, the coats are only on sale for 72 hours, and it’s not the entire collection, but I can’ help feeling that the Genie is out of the bottle, and there’s now no going back.
It’s all very well to do it once, for a few pieces, and to still build in a six week production cycle but managing it for the whole collection, with delivery time closer to what today’s consumer will expect is altogether a different matter. It’s nothing short of a complete redesign of the fashion system – a revolution.
February 25 No Comments
From Prada to Portraits
Continuing with the theme of trying to distil an image down to the bare minimum necessary to describe the subject (see my previous post ‘Gold Leaf and Prada Shoes‘), I am posting a recent portrait shot.
AJ Adjaye; DJ, Record Producer and all round nice guy, probably best known for his part in RPM agreed to sit for a portrait for me to experiment with these ideas. After a few beers he also agreed to be covered in vaseline and gold leaf; but that’s a different story!
I think there’s scope to push the idea further, but in the meantime, here’s an example from the shoot. Why not listen to a track from RPM while you look…:
February 22 No Comments
Gold Leaf and Prada Shoes
I’ve recently finished a series of shots of shoes. It started with a pair of nicely shaped, but rainbow coloured vintage shoes I picked up on Ebay. I had shot early last year with the very talented makeup artist Lucy Gibson and was inspired by her use of gold leaf, so used the technique on the shoes.
A gilded shoe is pretty surreal by itself, but I wanted to make the image as abstract as possible so that it wouldn’t be obvious at first glance what it was. Here’s the result:
I then shot a lovely pair of AW09 blue velvet shoes by Miu Miu in a similar style:
And finally a very sleek pair of black leather heels by Prada from a season or two ago:
The shape of the Prada shoe – the squared of profile of the toe, and the shape of the heel were so strong that it seemed unnecessary to show anything else.
The last image started me thinking about whether such a minimal approach could work in a portrait. More on this in my next post…
February 22 1 Comment
Welcome to my Blog
Welcome to my brand new Blog!
I’m a Fashion and Still Life photographer based in East London. At the moment I’m shooting most of my work in the studio, but do also work on location. You can see my work online at www.robertpoll.com.
I’m planning on posting my very latest work on the blog, along with occasional thoughts and comments on photography and fashion. I won’t be posting personal trivia, what I did at the weekend or other random thoughts so it will be low volume and, I hope, interesting.
I’ll tweet (@robertpollphoto ) when I post, so if you want to make sure not to miss anything then follow me on twitter. If you use RSS you can click here, or on the orange icon at the top right of the page to subscribe to my RSS feed. Otherwise, just bookmark this page and come back every week or so.
If you have any thoughts or comments please do get in touch; post a comment, email me or give me a call.
February 20 2 Comments