A Little More Elevated

There's a particular kind of creative meeting where someone says they want something a bit Phoebe Philo.

Everyone nods. Someone pulls up an old Céline campaign. There's a Juergen Teller reference in there somewhere. Maybe a little Helmut Lang. The casting should feel interesting but not too interesting. The lighting natural, but considered. Effortless, obviously, though achieving that particular kind of effortlessness will require a crew of twenty.

An hour later, the moodboard looks fantastic. What we're actually trying to say is anyone's guess.

Phoebe Philo | Céline

It's a familiar ritual. We spend a remarkable amount of time looking at other people's work. Collecting images, saving references, tracing influences. We can recognize a photographer by their lighting, a fashion house by its casting, an era by its typography. We know which campaign came before which, who photographed it, who styled it, and which obscure magazine published something suspiciously similar fifteen years earlier.

And we love all of it. That's part of the pleasure of working in a creative field. The endless rabbit holes. Finding an image that stops you in your tracks. Discovering that something you thought was new has a much older, stranger history.

But at some point, the reference started doing a little too much heavy lifting.

You see it in presentations all the time. A beautiful collection of images, each one more compelling than the last. There's an undeniable sensibility to the whole thing. You can feel what the project wants to be. And yet, take the references away and sometimes there's very little left.

We've become very good at knowing what we like.

Taste itself has become something of a personality trait. We communicate it through our clothes, our homes, our bookshelves, the restaurants we frequent. Even the things we claim not to care about are carefully considered. There's an entire social currency built around knowing the right things, preferably before everyone else does.

Which is fine. Taste is pleasurable. It's personal. It can be deeply revealing.

But having good taste and making good work are not quite the same thing.

Martin Margiela understood this rather well. The blank labels, the exposed seams, the obscured faces, the refusal to play fashion's usual game of personality and prestige. None of these ideas were particularly concerned with being tasteful. Some were deliberately awkward. But together they created a world so specific that even the absence of a logo became a form of recognition.

Margiela wasn't just making clothes that looked different. He was proposing a different way of thinking about fashion.

And that's where things get interesting.

Think about M/M (Paris), whose work can be elaborate, strange, graphic, romantic, occasionally quite ugly in the best possible way. There's no single treatment you could lift from their work and call it the M/M look. What connects it is something less tangible. A particular logic, a fascination with symbols and language, a willingness to take an idea further than might seem entirely reasonable.

You can borrow the typography. You can reference the compositions. You might even make something that looks convincingly like their work.

If the purpose is repurpose for the sake of being adjacent to a particular lexicon, that might hit the brief. Not everything needs to reinvent the wheel, particularly in commerce. But when we get the opportunity to actually be creative, few know where to start without becoming a mimic.

M/M Paris x Viviane Sassen for Missoni's AW14 Campaign

The same is true of photography. A slightly awkward pose, direct flash and an unremarkable location don't automatically make something a Juergen Teller photograph. Without the particular humour, intimacy or discomfort that gives the image its character, you're left with the visual equivalent of someone doing a very good impression.

And perhaps that's the distinction worth talking about.

A look is something you can describe. A visual language is something you develop.

It comes from the connections you make, the things you notice, the decisions you keep returning to. Sometimes it's a question of what you leave out. Sometimes it's the one element that seems completely wrong until suddenly it makes everything else work.

It's rarely as straightforward as finding the right reference.

Of course, making something genuinely distinctive is easier to discuss than to get approved.

Beauty is reassuring. Everyone can agree on a beautiful image. It looks expensive, the clothes look good, the lighting is lovely. Nobody is particularly worried.

Character is another matter.

An unusual face might be too unusual. A strange composition might make the product less immediately visible. A moment of humour might not feel sufficiently luxurious. Someone inevitably asks whether we can see an option that's a little more elevated.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the things that made the idea interesting begin to disappear.

Not always. Some of the best creative relationships are built on precisely the opposite instinct. A willingness to trust something before it's completely understood. To follow an idea somewhere unexpected, even when the reference doesn't exist yet.

Because that's the thing about references. They're wonderful at showing us what's possible. They're less useful when we start treating them as instructions.

And the most interesting work rarely arrives fully formed. It happens through experimentation, accidents, disagreements, and the occasional decision that looks questionable right up until it doesn't.

For brands, there's another complication. Once you've established a recognizable aesthetic, you're often expected to keep producing it. The same mood, the same casting, the same photographic treatment. Consistency becomes a kind of creative insurance policy.

But the brands and image-makers we remember tend to be the ones that can change without becoming unrecognizable. Their identity isn't tied to a particular shade of beige or a preferred lens. There's something underneath it all that holds.

A way of seeing the world, rather than simply a way of making it look.

Maybe that's what we're really searching for when we talk about taste. Not the ability to recognize what's good, but the ability to make choices that amount to something of our own.

After all, anyone can put together a beautiful moodboard.

The interesting part is what happens when you close it.