Editorial YOLO is part of a greater work named BCD – BEAUTIFUL COMMUNICATION DESIGN which I created for my bachelor thesis in 2015. It illustrates different fields of communication design connecting them to fashion photography.
The Story behind editorial YOLO
Fashion photography is, on purpose or as a side effect, soever advertising. It shows a product that the customer is supposed to desire because he likes the impression of the picture.
The AIDA principle is determinative of everything concerning advertisement:
ATTENTION (somebody’s attention is engaged) – INTEREST (he or she is interested) – DESIRE (the customer desires the product) – ACTION (the customer buys it)
The logical follow-up goal is winning costumers for future purchases too. Therefore brands create master plans for labels that are designed to elicit the sympathy of costumers.
Another method within the brand is the campaign. It is an action to increase sales or introduce and position new products through advertisements.
Thereby fashion campaigns often make use of the same strategy: The photos of their campaigns resemble conceptualized editorial series that parade a lifestyle or even stage a story. The pictures differ from look books, catalogue, or online shop photos by the location and the moody setting of light. Often, there are several models in action representing the target group.
Editorial YOLO ironically promotes the cliché of the admen’s own lifestyle in the manner of such a fashion campaign. They are regarded as the extreme version of all designers: excessive and offbeat, with no morale and therefore polarising.
Also polarising is the HIPSTER: it’s like an unowned label which is being confronted with love-hate among creative folks because everyone tries to dissociate from it. Therefore the idea of the hipster stays quite undefined.
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. – Oscar Wilde
In YOLO the seven models who are wearing hip outfits are in a strange club – an upside-down world where stools, globes, and lamps are hanging from the ceiling. They consume vine, communicate, celebrate, rival, and flaunt themselves in front of each other.
Such festivals have been celebrated in ancient Rome already. The so-called bacchanalia is an even better allegory for the present society’s consumer behaviour and the daze mania of Generation Y. Besides, the latter pursues self-fulfillment and individuality which could explain its dislike of the term Hipster.
You can’t escape fashion. When fashion becomes unfashionable, that again is fashion. – Karl Lagerfeld
Epilogue
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