Farfetch unveils photo project campaign with "iconic" 20th century images

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 16, 2021

Luxury fashion e-tailer Farfetch has unveiled The Art of Choice, a new international photography project that “reinvents the way we find fashion inspiration: an iconic image from yesterday becomes a tool to talk about fashion today”.

The Art of Choice “introduces the idea that we can imagine newness by taking inspiration from an archive of images of the past to discover the unparalleled choice of fashion available only on Farfetch”.

It’s certainly an interesting approach to a marketing campaign and it partnered with Magnum Photos to use images shot over past decades by photographers including Eve Arnold, Ernest Cole, Bruno Barbey, Chris Steele-Perkins and Herbert List. These shots act as a backdrop and “see their subjects wearing pieces that inevitably reflect the categories of clothes we wear today – the same we all use to describe, search and buy fashion every day”.

The company has also enlisted “pop culture auteurs” including music artist FKA twigs, photographer Tyler Mitchell and architect/musician Carl Gerges, supported by writer and curator Antwaun Sargent, to work on the campaign. They selected the themed series of images from the Magnum Photos archive.

The Art of Choice project will also see impromptu street installations, using city locations as public galleries in New York, London and Dubai, before the digital storytelling programme “extends the narrative to cities including Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, Moscow, Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo via the Farfetch community and curatorial Instagram accounts”. This also coincides with the launch of its TikTok channel.

The campaign was developed by the retailer with New Systems for Ideas, a recently formed international collective “focused on pioneering the interaction between fashion and technology through innovative ideas”.

Global Brand & Culture Director Ronojoy Dam said the project “introduces the idea of an advertising campaign drawing on nothing short of the history of modern photography. The photographers featured are some of the world’s most renowned. The interaction between hyper-localised presence and universal themes, artistic viewpoints and social storytelling, all underpinned by a digital mindset, is a reflection of times that call for new forms of communication.”

The e-tailer’s chief brand officer Holli Rogers added: “With the world’s largest selection of fashion available, Farfetch customers have a rare level of choice that allows them to transcend seasonal trends and freely curate the looks that express their own style and individuality. The Art of Choice is a fun and inspirational way to look back at timeless images of people and style for today’s fashion inspiration and bring to life this concept of infinite choice.”