I was browsing through a magazine and, among hundreds and hundreds of ads, this one caught my attention. It comes from Dedar, an Italian luxury textile house, and features a new fabric called Music: a richly textured pure virgin wool satin with a flowing drape.. Dedar’s Creative Director, Raffaele Fabrizio, deliberately pushed the campaign into the realm of abstract visual storytelling. According to Fabrizio, the goal was to prove that textiles are not passive backdrops but active, architectural elements capable of dictating the emotion and structure of a space. Some of the emotion can come from humor, and, in this case, it’s the surrealist type. Instead of showing fabric draped boringly over a traditional sofa, the ad follows the traditions of fashion design houses like Schiaparelli or Moschino, and prompts us to stop and look.
What I really liked is that the emotion is further emphasized by the contrast between the rigid corporate uniform placed onto a casual, cheap plastic lawn chair, stripping the "power suit" of its seriousness. This jarring juxtaposition (luxury fabric over a standard, mass-produced, ordinary plastic lawn chair) can offer us a useful lesson, even for those situations when you don’t have large budgets or graphic-design skills: place your transformation (whatever you’re promoting, a product, service or idea) against something visually humble, so the source of the change is unmistakable. People typically ask, “how can I make this impressive,” but an equally useful question could be: “What ordinary thing would become impressive once I touched it?” Sometimes value becomes most visible when it has something ordinary to transform.
