Vane makes tailoring for people who move for a living: dancers, stagehands, session musicians. The brand had strong product and no consistent image beyond a founder shooting lookbooks on her phone between fittings. We were brought on for one campaign and asked to stay on as ongoing art direction after it ran.

The direction leaned into motion rather than fighting it: every shot in the launch campaign shows a garment mid-movement, caught by a dancer or a stagehand doing their actual job rather than posing. We shot on location in three working theatres, on the clock between rehearsals rather than in a rented studio.

Clothes made to move should be shot moving. Everything else is just a very expensive still life.

Grading and sequencing mattered as much as the shots themselves. We built a fast, slightly bruised colour treatment that held together across stills, reels and the eventual look book, then wrote a short set of framing rules so Vane’s in-house team could keep shooting in the same language between seasons without us.

The campaign outperformed Vane’s previous season by a wide margin on organic reach alone, without paid support behind it. Three stockists increased their opening order off the strength of the imagery before a single garment shipped, which the founder still brings up as proof the clothes were never really the problem.