1) The idea of the “brand as publisher” — constantly dedicated to publishing content for its own community — has reframed how the industry approaches communications over the past few years. It has initiated a trend enabling complex, sophisticated multilayered narratives and multimedia storylines.
Recently, I have started to see a reaction to this trend. A subtle, but powerful desire to go back to simplicity, real moments that are best experienced in real life, and a sense of immediacy and truth that ultimately must be lived first-person. I believe this shift is indeed an influential movement, reintroducing the world to real and raw emotions and connectors, like vulnerability, a sense of imperfection, an openness to mistakes and the idea of constant work in progress.
This evolution will lead to work that challenges the way we think about communication, inspire new forms of the creative process, a new take on ideas and new production methods.
2) We are constantly challenging ourselves to evolve. We are always trying to anticipate growth in order to never be forced to react to it. We are looking today into adding the disciplines we will need tomorrow.
This past year, we have moved to new channels, tapping our ideas to editorial distribution through a partnership with Dazed, for example, or to live performances through music, and of course, heavily into fashion, and for myself, into publishing with a book I edited and designed for Rizzoli.
We are hiring as we speak in most departments, trying never to compromise on finding the absolute best talent for our creative culture. It’s a long process, probably the hardest of all, but surely the most important. We have been hiring from all over the world, and from all types of backgrounds. Our team currently comes from more than 16 different countries.
3) For the past three years we have been lucky enough to be responsible for the global creativity for adidas Originals. Our partnership is not structured as a typical agency-client relationship, and gives us constant access to their product teams, design intelligence, strategic thinking and more. In 2016 we launched a new collaboration I have been intimately involved in from the start–the Alexander Wang X adidas Originals collaboration, through which we have challenged all traditional expectations of a fashion collaboration launch. The adidas Original ethos is about challenging the status quo, so challenges are at the core of everything we do. They are a very intentional, deliberate part of our process. Another piece of work worth mentioning in a conversation about where we are going and where we are coming from as an industry, is the re-launch of adidas Gazelle, for which we took an image of a 19-year-old Kate Moss in 1993 and asked internet artist @bessnyc4 to hack it and to turn it into a completely new image, still iconic: a statement on the timelessness of both icons, Kate and the Gazelle.
The campaign ran with a line that said “remember the future.”
I also launched a book for Rizzoli with Jefferson Hack, founder of Dazed & Confused, called “We Can’t Do This Alone: Jefferson Hack the System” for which I designed 5000 different covers, which was a huge challenge we enjoyed solving together.
4) I believe we are going to witness a strong evolution in physical brand experiences and in how spaces are ideated, designed and produced. While the way we communicate and consume information has hanged dramatically in the past few years, we are thinking of physical retail today as we did decades ago. It will be exciting to see how brands will live, occupy and communicate through spaces in radical new ways.
