Even before Rihanna’s lingerie brand Savage X Fenty debuted its fashion show on Amazon’s Prime Video service on September 20th there was one commonrefrainfrom fashion press and Twitter pundits alike:
Rihanna has replaced the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
Specifically, that the Grammy-winner’s special had taken the formula behind Victoria’s Secret’s highly-rated network TV special—reportedly on ice this year as the brand works to recast its image—and amped it up with squads of dancers, fancy camerawork and a more body-positive message that critics say has been missing. Filmed at the Barclays Center during New York Fashion Week, Rihanna’s presentation featured the mogul herself posing in her own designs alongside 40 dancers and 40 models, including Cara Delevingne and Bella Hadid. They moved around the stage to live performances by artists like Migos, Big Sean and A$AP Ferg.
Savage X Fenty’s sales don’t come close to those of Victoria’s Secret, according to reporting earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal. But the brand raised an additional $50 million this August from investors like Jay-Z’s venture firm Marcy Venture Partners LLC. While Victoria’s Secret’s sales are declining, Savage X Fenty’s are on the rise. (Victoria’s Secret did not return a request for comment.)
“It’s never how can we go better than this person or how can we knock out this person—it’s never that,” says Fenty Corporation’s senior vice president Jennifer Rosales, who helped spearhead the show. “It’s what are we doing, what do we stand for, how are we executing [Rihanna’s] vision. And then if things fall in that direction, that’s the world’s perception.”
Rosales started work as the singer-slash-mogul’s personal assistant and is frequently referred to as Rihanna’s “right-hand woman.” Formally credited as an executive producer of the Amazon special, she said production came together in only six to eight weeks—a crunch created by waiting for a final greenlight from Amazon. (By contrast, Victoria’s Secret reportedly spent 18 months planning their 2016 show that aired on CBS.)
In an email, Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, explained that the deal for the special came out of talks with Roc Nation CEO Jay Brown. Salke and Brown had already teamed up on a pair of fast-moving viral projects: Free Meek, a docu-series about the prison system centered on the incarceration of rapper Meek Mill, and Guava Island, a film from actor Donald Glover (which also featured Rihanna, who is also a management client of Roc Nation). “We were looking to collaborate on a new project that would engage a global audience and create a cultural moment that was similar but also different from our other content,” she says. (Brown declined to comment).
With the go-ahead from Amazon, the Fenty team got its regular collaborators together, including choreographer Parris Goebel and director Alex Rudzinski, who shoots live events like MTV’s Video Music Awards and network musical specials like NBC’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Rudzinski says that the goal from the beginning was to create something unique and to capture it in one long take, rather than a conventional stop-start production. “We were trying to create something that was a mashup of a range of different genres of performance art, taking themes from musicals, fashion catwalks, dance choreography, [and] live music performance,” he says. “Blending all those together into this seamless piece, that had never been done before.”
Because of the short production schedule, the challenges were extreme. Five days before the show, the creative team decided to double the number of models and dancers to better fit both the performance and the cavernous Barclays Center space, says Rosales. That meant producing more than 160 outfits for the show instead of the roughly 80 they anticipated—requiring an additional 14 tailors and 20 assistants to come on board.
Rudzinski says there was only time for one day of rehearsal on camera and that he was given only seven days to work on the special before he had to deliver a final version to Amazon. The film at the beginning of the special (cut from around 300 hours of behind-the-scenes footage) reveals that choreographer Goebel created the show’s closing number three days before the show took place.
“We rested on September 21st when the show aired,” Rosales, who is also pregnant, says of the breakneck pace.
For Amazon’s part, though the company declined to release exact streaming statistics for the special, Salke says they’re thrilled with the result, especially as the show was a gateway for new subscribers. “The feedback from our customers has been fantastic,” she says. “A significant percentage of the Savage X Fenty Show audience came from first-time Prime Video viewers.”
Amazon carries Savage X Fenty and added a link above the “play” button telling customers to shop for looks from the show. Rihanna’s special—so far the only collaboration between Prime and Amazon Fashion—fits into the company’s plan of creating entertainment where you can buy things. A forthcoming competition reality show called Making the Cut, starring Project Runway alums Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, will reportedly let viewers buy the clothes designed in each episode.
Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-rihanna-and-amazon-pulled-off-their-fashion-week-special-11571056067
2019-10-14 12:27:00Z
CAIiEDSIbopa0d6eDrvwfIbL-kwqFwgEKg8IACoHCAow1tzJATDnyxUw54IY
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar