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My opinion as a tech-inclined person who works with many fashion/beauty clients in a creative capacity: fashion, in general, doesn’t understand tech, and have b

by adwi 6y ago

My opinion as a tech-inclined person who works with many fashion/beauty clients in a creative capacity: fashion, in general, doesn’t understand tech, and have been consistently 5-10 years late adopting The New. The industry continues to be centered around still photographs—generally for the average campaign 90% of the budget/crew will go to the photographs, and video will be thrown in as an afterthought, even though it is an order of magnitude more difficult to create—and nearly exclusively those stills will be experienced on a computer that is told to show that same frame 60 times every second forever. My clients are just barely starting to understand how video works. To try to get them to wade into 3D—and not just as a splashy one-off tool for attention, but for the actual day to day creation of hundreds of e-comm images/season—I don’t see this happening for a long time.

MeetingsBrowser 6y ago
I am nowhere near the fashion industry, but my kneejerk reaction is that the industry might be slow to adopt technology because they don't have that much to gain. If they are very familiar with still photographs and (I assume) can somewhat predict how still photographs will be perceived by the market, what is the incentive to switch to something new? As a consumer, my guess would be that a video or 3D display would not create a huge spike in revenue. In fact, if done poorly I could even see it having the opposite effect. So what is the incentive to invest time and money into switching to something new and risky? ------- CGI models however seem to be a different story. The cost saving aspect is clear cut and I as the consumer likely won't even realize anything has changed.
- adwi 6y ago
  Those are good points, but fashion exists in a logic-adjacent (interesting, infuriating) intersection of Art and Commerce; on a big set you can almost map where someone is on that continuum by their order on the call sheet. On one hand, it makes total sense to ask if embracing 3D stuff, or pushing (to my mind) a more appropriate use of the digital mediums in which we create and experience most things will lead to spike in revenue: If you do it poorly (read: solution looking for a problem) I wouldn’t expect that to make much of a leap in any real metrics—and if companies are trying to pass off images on the wrong side of the uncanny valley that’d be more likely to hurt than help. But it’s the Art that actually sells the “lifestyle” (read: clothes), and if you can create a gobsmacking incredible experience that makes people feel things you will absolutely see that in metrics and earned media and attention... There are so many interesting technologies that are widely accessible today that fashion companies aren’t embracing because 1) they don’t know to look for them and 2) they don’t understand how they work. Small example: I absolutely blew a (publicaly-traded) client’s mind showing them a projection mapping concept... 2 years ago, well after the tools made it a 15 minute job they could have gotten the savvy intern to execute.
Kinrany 6y ago
Is video actually better for them? Ten hand-picked photographs will probably look better than the whole video they were picked from.
- adwi 6y ago
  “Video-video” often not, and there’s a lot of work we do that the client is excited about making that you just know nobody will ever watch, but hey they’re paying the invoices and good excuse to hone the craft. And to your point the funny thing about fashion and narrative-style film/video is that when it’s a single frame of a skinny lady making a contorted pose in the middle of a crazy scene, you’ll accept that as given in a single image, but suddenly when you actually have to flesh out the world she’s in and try to create an implicit narrative around it to keep the viewer interested (instead of just a vague moody simulacrum of depth) it falls apart; when fashion people talk about “story” they are usually referencing the relationship between particular garments and poses between group still images, without any regard for what that word means in the larger narrative sense re: it being the key to human’s communication and attention. I think there’s more an opportunity to rethink the problem stills are solving, and if our current solutions are still the most interesting and medium-appropriate ways to address those. Like say we’re talking functional e-commerce imagery to sell you a specific sweater. What’s the best way to communicate the weight and flow of that sweater: through a 1/125th of a second of it puffed up to show its shape, or seeing how it actually flows and how the weight responds to manipulation in real time. Why deprive ourselves of all of that rich lighting and movement and color dynamics information our brains use to understand what we’re seeing, just because traditionally we’ve used ink smeared on wood pulp.

by adwi 6y ago

MeetingsBrowser 6y ago

I am nowhere near the fashion industry, but my kneejerk reaction is that the industry might be slow to adopt technology because they don't have that much to gain. If they are very familiar with still photographs and (I assume) can somewhat predict how still photographs will be perceived by the market, what is the incentive to switch to something new? As a consumer, my guess would be that a video or 3D display would not create a huge spike in revenue. In fact, if done poorly I could even see it having the opposite effect. So what is the incentive to invest time and money into switching to something new and risky? ------- CGI models however seem to be a different story. The cost saving aspect is clear cut and I as the consumer likely won't even realize anything has changed.

adwi 6y ago
Those are good points, but fashion exists in a logic-adjacent (interesting, infuriating) intersection of Art and Commerce; on a big set you can almost map where someone is on that continuum by their order on the call sheet. On one hand, it makes total sense to ask if embracing 3D stuff, or pushing (to my mind) a more appropriate use of the digital mediums in which we create and experience most things will lead to spike in revenue: If you do it poorly (read: solution looking for a problem) I wouldn’t expect that to make much of a leap in any real metrics—and if companies are trying to pass off images on the wrong side of the uncanny valley that’d be more likely to hurt than help. But it’s the Art that actually sells the “lifestyle” (read: clothes), and if you can create a gobsmacking incredible experience that makes people feel things you will absolutely see that in metrics and earned media and attention... There are so many interesting technologies that are widely accessible today that fashion companies aren’t embracing because 1) they don’t know to look for them and 2) they don’t understand how they work. Small example: I absolutely blew a (publicaly-traded) client’s mind showing them a projection mapping concept... 2 years ago, well after the tools made it a 15 minute job they could have gotten the savvy intern to execute.

Kinrany 6y ago

Is video actually better for them? Ten hand-picked photographs will probably look better than the whole video they were picked from.

adwi 6y ago
“Video-video” often not, and there’s a lot of work we do that the client is excited about making that you just know nobody will ever watch, but hey they’re paying the invoices and good excuse to hone the craft. And to your point the funny thing about fashion and narrative-style film/video is that when it’s a single frame of a skinny lady making a contorted pose in the middle of a crazy scene, you’ll accept that as given in a single image, but suddenly when you actually have to flesh out the world she’s in and try to create an implicit narrative around it to keep the viewer interested (instead of just a vague moody simulacrum of depth) it falls apart; when fashion people talk about “story” they are usually referencing the relationship between particular garments and poses between group still images, without any regard for what that word means in the larger narrative sense re: it being the key to human’s communication and attention. I think there’s more an opportunity to rethink the problem stills are solving, and if our current solutions are still the most interesting and medium-appropriate ways to address those. Like say we’re talking functional e-commerce imagery to sell you a specific sweater. What’s the best way to communicate the weight and flow of that sweater: through a 1/125th of a second of it puffed up to show its shape, or seeing how it actually flows and how the weight responds to manipulation in real time. Why deprive ourselves of all of that rich lighting and movement and color dynamics information our brains use to understand what we’re seeing, just because traditionally we’ve used ink smeared on wood pulp.