Missoni cultivate a new, avant garde image with their Fall 10/11 video campaign
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Must-See Collaboration Between Missoni and Kenneth Anger
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Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Missoni cultivate a new, avant garde image with their Fall 10/11 video campaign
Known for their distinctive, rainbow-hued knitwear and matriarchal heritage, Missoni is a brand brimming with personality which might generally be termed ‘enduring’ rather than ‘hip’. However, their latest video campaign for Fall 10/11, shot by 83 year-old experimental filmmaker, actor and writer Kenneth Anger is nothing if not avant garde and achingly cool. While a ‘lo-fi’ video style which celebrates analogue ‘glitches’ has been a slow-burning trend in music, as a luxury brand Missoni are very much at the cutting edge in presenting this style of video campaign. Fashion label Felder Felder have commissioned a video with a similar psychedelic look and feel from David Dunan, but it is less of a statement from a brand which has been built around a trend-led, ‘hipster’ appeal.
In part this style of video seems like an aesthetic rejection of the sleek, polished perfection of digital, but are Missoni also playing a commercial game and pitching themselves at a younger, more trend-conscious audience? And will it work?
