The editorial team at British Vogue was driven to think creatively during the coronavirus pandemic, when lockdown meant it couldn’t plan photoshoots to capture visuals of the latest pieces from designers’ Autumn/Winter 2020 (AW20) collections.

Driven by Creative Directors Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding for Suburbia, the iconic brand turned to Framestore to augment imagery from the Vogue vaults with the latest fashions from designers including Gucci, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Alexander McQueen. A suite of 18 images and five cinemagraphs were created using iconic images; the oldest image dating back to 1947.

Framestore digitally redressed the models in the photos which include Twiggy, Christy Turlington, Kate Moss and Bianca Jagger, working closely with the team at British Vogue who art directed the stills in the same way they would a photoshoot; only both digitally and remotely.

The team at Framestore, led by Executive Creative Director William Bartlett and Concept Artist Nikola Yordanov, were given reference materials from the AW20 catwalk shows of some of the industry’s most notable fashion houses and used these to recreate the pieces and augment them into the archival images. While it might initially seem like it would just need an artist to Photoshop some new clothes into some images, the reality was much more complex. IT involved bringing together lots of different references as well as creating 3D elements and cloth textures to create a convincing representation of the new garments.

The team had to fit the digital garments to the archive models’ existing poses, up-res them to the highest-resolution without any degradation in quality and replicate the photographer’s meticulously-chosen lighting to blend everything together seamlessly.

It was really important that the work saw the recreation of photographers’ chosen light sources to maintain visual aesthetics defined by another artist, in some cases more than 70 years ago.

Both British Vogue and Framestore are experts in creating beautiful imagery in their respective fields and this project represents two very different creative companies coming together to overcome challenges presented by the restrictions of the covid-19 pandemic.

"We are thrilled to partner creatively with Framestore for this unique project, which allowed us to seamlessly adorn some of the best known photographs from Vogue's past decades with items from the new season collections, in a fantasy of epochs old and new," says Lee Swillingham, Creative Director of British Vogue.

British Vogue - AW20 archive

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