4 Fashion Brands That are Crushing Video Content Right Now

Commonly mistaken for overpriced clothing, high fashion is a different breed of art. Fashion brands create an aspirational aesthetic worn by the cultural elite, such as the influencers, the tastemakers, and the people in high places. Effective content, including advertisements, for high fashion brands requires a lofty level of polish, class, and sophistication, elevating the brand in our minds and compelling us aspire to be the person we see in frame.

With any production, whether it’s for a sports brand or a fashion label, the filming location contributes immensely to the overall aesthetic of the piece. As a result, finding the right location can be one of the hardest steps in pre-production. Fortunately, Peerspace offers thousands of unique spaces in hundreds of cities, featuring numerous creative places to shoot your next fashion film. With that being said, let’s break down how four different fashion brands managed to create ads and memorable video content for high-fashion appeal. We’ll also dive into what exactly makes them so well done.

1. Saint Laurent

This particular ad from Saint Laurent uses an edgy soundtrack to set the stage for an ethereal ride into the wildly ambitious, edgy, dark energy of their spring collection. The filmmaker behind this ad spent a profound amount of effort and time creating a slow onset feeling of unease, which morphs into sensory overload and euphoria by the end of the piece.

Everything about this ad conveys the exact emotion that is present in the clothing itself, and every piece mirrors and feeds into the other. The clothing is sensual and revealing, meant to be worn by an impressive individual with great taste.

The soundtrack is controlled and folds back in on itself, feeding each note to the other to grow stronger throughout the piece, until the action settles. Four different dystopian worlds collide through the visuals, with colors from each place bleeding into the next, and many complex effects used to simplify and smooth the transitions between worlds and marry them together.

This creates a single, holistic view of the world through this edgy, sensual, euphoric feeling. This ad, above all else, is a work of art crafted so beautifully that it deserves recognition for its singularity of vision and masterful execution.

2. Diesel

This ad is an ingenious showcase of how simple locations, paired with a powerful concept and story, can drive home a straightforward message. Diesel is trying to sell attractive clothes to consumers who like to feel sexy, edgy, and fashion-forward.

That is a rather complex concept to sell in a 30-second video, yet the brand has done so perfectly. The ad appeals to an innate driver of human behavior — which is already connected to fashion — i.e., sexiness. When you buy new clothes, even simple or cheap clothes, you can only hope that it makes you feel comfortable and confident in your own skin.

Diesel understands that while influencers are cool, there is a massive portion of their audience that wants to buy simple, affordable, sexy clothing, but they are just fed up with influencers from the coasts populating their feeds. So, this ad uses influencers’ overpriced and overdressed aesthetic to poke fun at them, and shows that keeping things simple in Diesel’s new collection is way more appealing than what other brands are trying to sell you.

From a technical standpoint, this stunning ad is shot very thoughtfully by a talented cinematographer, despite the video featuring only two locations and two scenes. They kept production very simple, and in post-production, only one glitch effect was used, which anyone can make for free. The production may be straightforward, but the concept and story are ingenious.

3. Nike

The Nike Tech Pack Collection is a high-fashion, trendy design meant to showcase the future of what Nike can create for the masses. Right now, however, it’s limited at a high price due to exclusivity. This video is the most technically demanding, and therefore also the most impressive example on this list.

Firstly, the set design itself is incredible. They’ve taken a beautiful, clean, well-lit space, then enhanced and extended it with 3D modeling and CGI. This is likely just a white room with markers on the walls that’s combined with a VFX artist replacing the room in post-production.

In addition, the clothing itself in the ad is warped, stretched, erased, and augmented in a variety of ways based on the soundtrack and the individual product. These effects are masterfully produced in a way that does not obstruct the clothing itself, but makes it stand out and take on a new meaning or feeling for the viewer thanks to how the effect is changing it.

A production like this has to be extensively pre-planned, with very little room for change in the final edit. The visual effects are likely extravagant in budget and tough to execute. Every second of VFX costs more time and money, and so with productions like this, every shot is planned down to the second so that it can be executed as efficiently as possible.

Other than that, the soundtrack is spot-on for the technical, futuristic vibe of the ad. The clothing looks amazing, the models are stunning, and every detail down to the contacts in their eyes adds to the sense of awe as the future of clothing unfolds in the frame. Advertising like this is exactly why Nike is one of the most recognizable brands on Earth.

4. Chanel

Chanel is the epitome of women’s aspirational advertising, much in the same way that Nike leads the sports and technical fashion industry. In the short film “Coco Mademoiselle,” we follow famed actress Keira Knightley through a gorgeous city in Europe on her way to a photoshoot.

When the photographer comes onto her, she seduces him right up until the point where he locks the door behind them, and she leaves through the window. The soundtrack throughout plays “This Is a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” and right as she leaves, the lyrics are, “But it won’t mean nothing… without a woman.”

This line, perfectly timed in the piece, with elegant footage to illustrate the point, makes the ad a success. It ties the storyline into the point of the piece, using that point to elevate the brand of Chanel and sell more products, as every woman wants to believe that her man would be nothing without her.

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