Mercedes-Benz is activating its title sponsorship of Berlin Fashion Week with a new webfilm – ‘A Fistful of Wolves’ – which is essentially a parody mocking the melodramatic clichés of fashion advertising.
The hilarious send-up creative – which stars fashion boutique wwww.MyTheresa.com buyer Justin O’Shea, his significant other, plus style editor of Harper’s Bazaar Germany Veronika Heilbrunner And former online editor-at-large at Vogue Germany Julia Knolle – is stylish, atmospheric, beautiful, yet vapid, trite, anticlimactic and total nonsense.
The narrative follows a deadpan O’Shea waking on the ‘fashionable side of the bed’ and then walking and talking his way through self-indulging fashion advertising.
‘The streets blazed with a gentle chaos,’ says O’Shea. ‘I knew just the place where I could get what I needed.’
What he ‘needed’, it turns out, was a shop for milk!
O’Shea’s vehicle for the story is a 1970 Mercedes C111.
The tongue-in-cheek, three-and-a-half-minute spot, directed by Danny Sangra and developed by agency Alldayeveryday, is essentially the latest webisode in the premium car brand’s ongoing ‘Fashion Creatives’ series (which can be seen here).
This is the third episode of the automaker’s Fashion Creatives series, which also includes a funny spot about based around the popular ‘The Man Repeller’ fashion blog,
and a comic ad based around actor Marco Lepew.
Comment
From London and New York, to Australia and Berlin, Mercedes has a long and high profile heritage in fashion week sponsorship.
This strategy is built around the idea that the consumer decision to buy a car or an outfit defines the way in which people present themselves and thus that ‘trend-setting design and innovation play a central role in both the fashion business and the auto industry.
Of course, the clichéd side of both industries can be easy to mock – so why not embrace that?
This is one of the funniest fashion sponsor ads ever.
It blends clichéd 70s perfume commercials with stylised, slow-mo movies like The Matrix (as well as some of the more over-the-top car ads – like Matthew McConaughey’s Lincoln commercials).
It also offers a rare chance to see the limited edition orange and black C111 concept car glide through the streets of Berlin’s Grunewald district.
Links
Mercedes-Benz YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/MercedesBenzTV
Mercedes-Benz Website
http://www.mercedes-benz.com
Mercedes-Benz Google+
https://plus.google.com/+MercedesBenz/posts
Mercedes-Benz Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/MercedesBenz
Mercedes-Benz Twitter
https://twitter.com/MercedesBenz
Mercedes-Benz Instagram
http://instagram.com/mercedesbenz
Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin
http://mbfashionweek.com/berlin
Alldayeveryday Website
http://www.alldayeveryday.com/
