Ecthomo: Trembled Blossoms
Posted by Qais Fulton
The trend by couture designers to take inspiration for their advertising campaigns from surreal art is a most welcome one. Prada’s Spring-Summer 2008 line is advertised with the work above, which while beautiful, at times suffers from the translation of static image to dynamic. Artist James Jean produced the storyboards for the film, which are more stunning than the video by dint of not having to move. Particularly interesting are James’ flower/insect concept sketches, the delicate petals of each blossom supported on the shelled stilts of a beetle; so alien they seem to have sprung from Alice’s Incongruous Wonderland, in which the fields of chittering tulips scuttle and sway with the wind.
Trembled Blossoms [Drawn! : Cartoon Brew : NotCot]
Categories: Design, Advertisements, Insects, Animation, Aliens, Fashion, Art
Posted at 6:32 pm on February 8, 2008
2 Comments -
Achingly beautiful, even if it’s crassly consumerist. What tickles me most is that an ad campaign for such a high-end designer anything remotely like this over, say, 40 years ago would have been utterly alien. Makes me wonder how fashion will be touted when I’m 70.
Comment by License Farm — February 10, 2008 @ 5:19 am
Prada deserves high praise for its artistic largesse over the past half-decade or more, but this movie wasn’t much of anything new, was it?
The imagery is derivative of 30 year-old Moebius cartoons, at best, with a slight dose of Peter Max graphics (or Styx’s “The Grand Illusion” album cover) thrown in for good measure.
To make four minutes of animation so stunningly boring is an accomplishment, of sorts, but it certainly isn’t art.
Again, it could choose to create really unique and challenging works, but they’d have to come from someplace inside the company other than the marketing department.
I’ve mused on this a bit at DIM BULB if you’d like to check it out: http://dimbulb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/the-cartoon-wea.html
Comment by Jonathan Salem Baskin — February 11, 2008 @ 8:54 am