Paparazzi, But Make It Fashion
Kendall Jenner, Bad Bunny and A$AP Rocky fronting paparazzi-style campaigns cement its industry takeover
Paparazzi may get a lot of stick, but paparazzi fashion is where it's at right now. Trends come and go, but being candidly captured by the flash of a paps’ camera is now a forever thing.
In the glitzy realm of fashion campaigns where perfection has long been the norm, Bottega Veneta's latest move is a breath of stagnant air. The Italian luxury brand has taken a leap into the world of the mundane with its "Readymade" campaign starring A$AP Rocky and Kendall Jenner.
Typically, our feeds are flooded with overly stylized photo shoots, so Bottega's decision to embrace a paparazzi-style aesthetic feels like a shrug of the shoulders and a rebellion against meticulously staged fashion norms.
The campaign captures A$AP and Jenner navigating daily life while doing typical bicoastal activities — getting groceries, jogging, dog walking and so on.
Bottega was hands-off in working with both of the celebs on this pap-and-snap series. Rocky styled himself while Jenner was aided by her longtime stylist Dani Michelle and this tactic seems to have worked — in 48 hours the campaign drew in $2.8 million in Media Impact Value according to social media analytics firm LaunchMetrics.
It's a fashion meets reality TV type of vibe, where luxury and the banality of everyday existence have come together as one.
But this trend of adopting a paparazzi-inspired approach to high fashion is not a mere fluke.
It's a movement gaining momentum across the fashion landscape as brands like Gucci, Balenciaga and Yeezy have already dabbled in the same territory. But will it last?
In 2023, Gucci enlisted Kendall Jenner and her then-beau Bad Bunny for an airport-themed campaign. Lugging around monogrammed Gucci bags and suitcases the imagery had a deliberately unvarnished feel to it.
And once upon a time Ye transformed Kim K and her Klones into a mobile army of walking billboards. With Sami Miro, Amina Blue and Paris Hilton appearing as the former Mrs West's doppelgängers dressed in Yeezy head-to-toe, it was an orchestrated take on the paparazzi aesthetic.
Even DJ and music producer Diplo couldn't resist joining the parade, donning the hashtag #YeezySeason6 with his own recreation of the campaign — eye-roll worthy behaviour if you ask me. But the less said about that, the better.
That all goes to show that in the grand theatre of visual culture, paparazzi language is now an everyday lexicon as it finds itself in the liminal space between lowbrow and highbrow content.
We love to hate it and yet we want more of it.
And everyone, even the celebs we side eye yet rally behind, want a piece of the action. Paparazzi visual commentary has become the standard.
The result of this unexpected yet purposefully orchestrated pap take over? A flurry of celebrity-fronted campaigns themed around the allure of the paparazzi whether we asked for them or not.
Is this the demise of ultra-glossy fashion campaigns? And are we witnessing a shift towards more candid, unplanned fashion aesthetics?
Maybe yes, maybe no. Only time will tell.
Pap campaigns fulfil our voyeuristic nature and they're not going anywhere. They give us a peek behind the closed doors of the rich and famous, albeit out in the open where the whole world can see.
And they're a new age take on guerilla marketing where clothing has been modelled by a celeb before we even knew it.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... we all know how that goes.
But let's not be fooled into thinking that the industry, and those fronting the campaigns, don't know exactly what they're doing.
A$AP Rocky, in a stroke of self-awareness, revealed the Bottega campaign's behind-the-scenes machinations on Instagram.
“Throughout history, there has always been a funny relationship between photographers and celebrities. Even down to the rights and the usage of photos, and the tabloid hustle, there’s always seemed to be a disconnection between famous people and the photographers who follow & film them. While certain celebrities call the paparazzi on themselves, other celebrities might get confrontational with photographers. While a very small few, such as myself, don’t mind, as long as they post the good angles, of course.
So, in light of good angled photos, myself and the creative minds at Bottega Veneta thought it would be genius to bridge that gap and utilise my everyday lifestyle type of photos taken by candid photographers while I do my everyday thing. So this serves less as a campaign and more as a creative trifecta brought to you by Bottega Venetta’s Matthieu Blazy, myself A$AP Rocky, and the talented tabloid-style photographers involved. Cheers & thank u."
Paparazzi fashion is blurring the lines between reality and orchestrated promotion. It's the fashion world's way of saying, "Oh, you thought reality was unscripted? Cute.”
It seems that fashion is craving authenticity even if there are debates about how ‘real’ the imagery ends up being.
Fashion campaigns have pirouetted into seriously meta terrain, they have an ironic tone and a wink of self-awareness as they peel back the layers of the industry's constructed facade.
Just as paparazzi pics profit from spotlighting the artifice of fame, paparazzi fashion campaigns illuminate the deliberate theatrics and pre-planned nature of glossy spreads and trends.
As fashion continues to navigate this nuanced relationship with paparazzi imagery, a new era may be dawning. The medium is the message and the message is more important than ever.
The blend of reality and fantasy, candid moments and staged scenes, has become the very essence of what people want and expect.
In an industry built on aspiration, perhaps the most aspirational thing right now is the unscripted moments of the everyday.
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