I wrote eight style tips for Atelier Munro as part of our campaign together, which have now been published online alongside the photos and video shot in Florence for the spring/summer part of the campaign. Go check it out! The video and photography is glorious, shot by their regular collaborators Mounir Raji and Milan Vandril.
You can also see the looks I put together for the spring/summer season here.
The campaign was the brainchild of creative director Joachim Baan, and brand officer Chris van Veghel plus their marketing team, who helped create the story.
Joachim’s creative vision for the company is to promote their products as customized for each person, rather than emphasize a particular house style (which is typical of all clothiers, and indeed every brand on earth). He wants to emphasize the ability to make something personally yours.
I think he found in me a kindred spirit. My advice and writing has never been to tell you to buy these 5 seasonal staples or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life or throw away the clothes from 2 years ago because they’re so done. But instead I like to write in principles, philosophies and maxims to live by on your journey to expressing your own personal style (did I just write three synonyms to make that sentence sound more sophisticated? Yes I did).
Further, I think he saw in me someone who could put their customization options through their paces and create a selection of looks that would help flesh out that vision he’s been building. Browsing their past portraits and general marketing imagery, while I see explicit emphasis on customization in the written copy, I also see a lot of visual cues that effectively reinforce a house style. There’s a particular kind of look that many European clothing companies share, and that Euro look comes out to me on their website. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I think it may be impossible to completely transcend the cultural forces that infuse the tastes of the people doing the work to create the brand.
Think of how a British brand looks; or an Italian brand; or an American brand. There are associations that each country’s history and culture will bring to bear on any project someone from that place embarks on. And as a company gets business, those very characteristics play a part in attracting customers, so it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Bringing it back to Munro, it makes perfect sense that they might ask 100 different people to create a custom look, and many of them end up sharing a similar Euro vibe—it’s a European custom clothing company after all. And of course you can’t forget the impact the patterns the MTM jackets are based on playing a role.
When I put together 5-6 looks for our three-city photo and video shoot, I made clothes that reflected my own personal culture and the things I love—Americana and Ivy influence + Southern Italian tailoring and sprezzatura. Combined with the photography style of Mounir and the locations we shot in, I think the result feels anything but Euro.
So cheers to Joachim, Chris and their team for creating something unique and moving towards that vision. And many, many thanks for the campaign!
Read my review of Atelier Munro here.
See the first part of the campaign here.
