As I have mentioned before, I was set an individual summative brief over the Christmas break. I was asked to create a brand/retail promotion and visual report focused on a trend that I had previously researched. The report had to be split into three sections, Fashion Communication, Cultural Communication and Your Communication. I will be taking you through each of the sections, explaining why I chose certain images to support my report.
Task 1a was to select two fashion adverts from different market levels that featured my chosen trend. My favourite way of presenting research and all my ideas is to create a sketchbook, this is a creative way of working and I also enjoy doing this so I decided to put all my research into a sketchbook. Here are the pages of my sketchbook for task 1a. As you can see, I looked at adverts that featured literal snakes, snakes and shoes, snakeskin applied to clothing and accessories and snakes and fragrance.
After looking at a range of advertisements, I picked the Kurt Geiger advert and the Dolce and Gabbana advert. I chose these because I felt like they would be better to critically analyse as one portrays snakeskin in a sexual, seductive way and the other conveys snakeskin as a luxury. As Dolce and Gabbana is a high end brand, it has more to lose when it comes to advertising whereas Kurt Geiger can takes risks as it doesn't have to be as conservative.
For task 1b, I had to focus on retail analysis and research visual merchandise that used snakeskin. This was a difficult task because there was hardly any examples online and when I went to take my own images of snakeskin within retail (in London and New York) there was nothing because all the displays and shop interiors were still festive.
Despite that, I managed to find two examples that were polar opposites. Alexander McQueen had a window display in the Bond Street store, this was an overloaded of print and colour. It featured his dress from the 2010 collection, there was a blown up image as the background, a snakeskin mannequin, snakeskin shoes and clothing. Calvin Klein on the other hand had a shop window that included two walls of snakeskin print and two mannequins that displayed black outfits, this was minimal and suited the brand image. I chose these two brands because they both stayed true to their brand identity incorporating snakeskin but to fit their image.
Soon to follow - Task 2a and 2b
Photo Credit - Chloe Ferdinand, Google Images and Pinterest
