NEW YORK – Kate Spade’s spring ad campaign will take the company’s preppy image into a new format.
The company has called upon the Neistat Brothers, a pair of up-and-coming filmmakers, to supplement the print visuals with a trio of short films.
“We like storytelling,” said Andy Spade, Kate Spade’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “[And short films] are another way to talk to people.”
One of the films, “Majorettes,” tells the story of two twentysomething women who are wandering through a suburban town, separately. The women are wearing identical clothes and both are loaded up with Kate Spade accessories. At the end of the film, they meet up with one another.
Another film features a woman from Bisbee, Ariz., near where Spade was born and where he and company namesake and co-founder Kate Spade went to college at Arizona State University. The woman in the film is reminiscing while eating a piece of pie.
The films will be projected onto various buildings during New York Fashion Week near the tents at Bryant Park, although specific locations were not disclosed. Spade also has plans to show them in upcoming months on Plum TV, a channel that airs in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; Vail, Colo., and other upscale resort towns, as well as enter them in various short film festivals.
The 12-page print campaign for spring is the largest Kate Spade has ever done and is in a narrative style. Photographed by Tim Walker and styled by Camille-Bidault Waddington under Julia Leach’s creative direction, the ads mirror the short films and are about two stylish city women who take a road trip to their childhood town, Bisbee. There are shots of the women shopping for vintage accessories, reading books in a used bookstore and hitchhiking to Manhattan after their car has broken down on the highway.
Featured styles in the campaign include Kate Spade’s wicker hobo bags, optic print clutches with leather trim and sandals with coral accents. The clothes, which are mostly vintage, include officer’s jackets and knee-length skirts.
Spade likened the collaboration with Walker to another famous designer-photographer partnership.
“Tim relates to [our offering] as we relate to his photography,” he said. “It reminds me of how Ralph Lauren worked with Bruce Weber. It’s simpatico.”
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The full print campaign bows in March issues of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New York Times’ T and Town & Country.
Alternative advertising methods are not new for Andy Spade, who spent 11 years as an advertising executive at firms including Saatchi & Saatchi before cofounding the company. In 1995, two years after the company was started, he implemented a poster campaign in major cities showing Kate Spade in quirky situations.
In September 2005, The Neiman Marcus Group, which purchased a majority interest of Kate Spade in 1999 for $33.6 million, put it up for sale. Texas Pacific Group and Warburg Pincus, two equity firms, acquired NMG in May for $5.1 billion and are still seeking a sale of Kate Spade.