AW20 arrived at a pivotal point for Superdry.
The business had been through significant structural change and, the previous year, Phil Dickinson had joined as Creative Director after a career that had included some huge roles across Nike Football, Nike Sportswear and Umbro. Phil brought a very particular mentality with him, challenge what already exists, understand who the consumer actually is, understand what they want from the brand and then create the best possible expression of that product to make them want it.
There was nothing particularly romantic about the commercial side of his thinking either. Creative ultimately had a job to do, make people care enough about what was in front of them that they wanted to take the money out of their pockets.
What I loved about Phil was that he was willing to pull things apart before attempting to put them back together. Superdry had become enormous, but with that scale had come a breadth of product that could sometimes make it difficult to understand exactly who we were speaking to and why, and a lot of the thinking around AW20 was about trying to answer that.
Rather than assuming there was one single “Superdry customer”, the business had undertaken consumer segmentation work and begun building the collections around different style choices and different attitudes towards fashion. Superdry described the model at the time as one brand, four style choices and nine consumer opportunities, allowing product and marketing to speak more directly to different types of people instead of asking one creative expression to stretch across everything.
The naming and structure continued to evolve over the seasons that followed, but the thinking behind it was already very clear. There was the part of Superdry rooted in the Americana, vintage and casual heritage that had always been fundamental to the brand, Studios took the product somewhere cleaner, more sophisticated and minimal, Sport was being pushed towards a far more credible performance and sportstyle position, while Superdry X and its pinnacle SDX expression gave the younger, streetwear-focused side of the business somewhere to become much more disruptive and experimental.
These weren’t supposed to feel like the same product with a different logo attached. Each needed its own consumer, its own design language and eventually its own creative system around it, with teams internally beginning to organise themselves around those worlds rather than simply traditional product categories. For me that was incredibly exciting, but it also meant AW20 carried a huge amount of pressure because this wasn’t simply another seasonal collection. It was one of the first opportunities to properly show how different Superdry could now look depending on which part of the brand you stepped into.
And then 2020 changed pretty much everything.
There probably isn’t much value in retelling everything that year did to the world, but from a fashion and production perspective it removed many of the things we would ordinarily have relied on. If you wanted to introduce a major new collection and reposition the perception of a fashion brand, one of the most obvious routes would have been some form of physical presentation or fashion show, bringing press, buyers, industry figures and people with influence into one space, putting the clothes in front of them properly, creating excitement around the change and allowing those conversations to spread through their own networks.
Except gathering people together was now precisely what we couldn’t do.
The entire fashion industry was being forced to rethink how it presented collections, with London Fashion Week itself moving towards a mixture of digital and heavily controlled physical activations. For us, the question became whether the inability to hold a conventional fashion show should actually stop us from creating one at all.
It shouldn’t.
The restriction needed to change the execution, not the ambition.
From a creative and production point of view, the internal team came together to work out what that could look like. Whatever we built had to operate with a significantly reduced footprint, the crew needed to remain controlled, we had to work responsibly within the restrictions of the time and, wherever possible, use the infrastructure and people we already had inside Superdry.
Trying to recreate a conventional large-scale catwalk behind closed doors didn’t make sense, so instead we started thinking about how we could build the catwalk through film.
The film team developed a green-screen studio that could remain in place for roughly four to five weeks rather than attempting to force the entire collection through one enormous production day. We built the capture around a multi-camera setup so we could record different perspectives simultaneously, giving us enough coverage and movement to create the feeling of a catwalk without dramatically increasing the amount of time each model needed to spend on set.
That longer production window also gave us a solution to another problem that anybody who has shot fashion at scale will understand immediately, the sheer amount of product that needs to exist before a camera ever rolls.
Superdry had an enormous amount of it, and even on a normal production there is a chain that has to work almost perfectly. Design needs the correct samples ready, those samples have to physically arrive, styling needs enough time to build and approve looks, production needs to understand what actually exists before it can schedule anything, and then the creative team still needs enough time to capture that product as its best expression.
COVID made every part of that chain harder. Shipping and supply chains were being disrupted globally, samples that might ordinarily have arrived predictably suddenly couldn’t be relied upon and building one fixed shoot date around hundreds of pieces would have meant gambling that everything arrived at exactly the right time when very little else in the world was operating normally.
Rather than fight that problem, we designed the production around it.
E-commerce was already continuing to shoot product, so we began integrating the catwalk capture into that existing workflow. Across several weeks, models coming through the e-commerce studio could also be selected to represent the different worlds within AW20, allowing us to gradually build the catwalk as product became available instead of waiting for everything to exist at exactly the same moment.
From memory, the models were being tested for COVID throughout that process and the workflow was built around keeping movement through the studio controlled and responsible. It wasn’t the glamorous version of production people might associate with a fashion show, but it meant we could continue creating safely while huge parts of the normal industry had effectively stopped.
That approach also forced us to think very differently about casting because we weren’t looking for one homogeneous group of models to walk every part of Superdry. The whole point of the AW20 reset was that these collections represented different consumers and different attitudes, so the people appearing within them needed to help communicate those differences.
Original & Vintage couldn’t simply feel like Studios with different clothes on, just as the energy around SDX needed to feel fundamentally different from the sophistication of Studios or the performance focus of Sport.
That was where the simplicity of the green screen became really useful.
We weren’t trying to create the finished world in-camera, we were creating the raw material that would allow each world to be built afterwards. For me as Director, that became one of the most interesting parts of the project because normally you are reacting to a location, set, lighting, atmosphere and all of the visual information surrounding the model, whereas here much of that environment simply didn’t exist yet.
The performance therefore had to give post-production something to work with. Movement, pace, attitude and how somebody carried the product became incredibly important because those were the ingredients that would eventually allow completely different visual environments to grow around exactly the same physical studio.
We also had the advantage of time. The multi-week approach meant we weren’t trying to make hundreds of decisions in one frantic day, we could look at what we had captured, understand what was working and continue refining the process as more models and more product came through.
That is something I have carried into productions ever since. Constraints don’t always make the work smaller, sometimes they force you to design a better system.
Once the capture started coming together, the next challenge was turning a succession of people walking through a green studio into something that genuinely felt worthy of introducing a new chapter for the brand, and that was where the wider creative partners became incredibly important.
Creep handled the post-production process, while Oli Pearson and OPM worked with us on the music, using their network and expertise to bring composers into the project and develop bespoke compositions for the individual films rather than treating the soundtrack as something we would simply find once the pictures were finished. Music became fundamental to giving each piece its pace, personality and identity, helping separate those different consumer worlds even further.
For elements of the Sport world, we then worked with HyperCulture and Artbox in Amsterdam, taking the clean green-screen material and deliberately pushing it somewhere far more experimental.
HyperCulture were given around two and a half minutes of material and a very tight window to develop the visual treatment, creating an approach that referenced progressive magazine layouts and combined motion design, typography and graphic experimentation. Suddenly the models could exist inside a world that would have been incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for us to physically construct under the conditions we were working within.
That became one of the real strengths of the format because the physical restriction effectively disappeared in post.
Instead of being limited by the fact that we could only safely shoot people against a green screen in Cheltenham, that simplicity became the starting point for something much bigger. Each treatment could respond to the collection it represented, allowing us to move between completely different visual languages without rebuilding an entire stage or moving a large production crew from location to location.
The final work became our virtual catwalk around London Fashion Week, appearing digitally and through public-facing placements during the week itself. What had started as a solution to not being able to stage the obvious physical event had become something that actually felt incredibly appropriate to the moment, a digital presentation of a brand that was itself trying to show people that it was changing.
Looking back, the wider AW20 launch became an important part of Superdry’s reset. The business saw strong engagement around the Autumn campaigns despite everything happening around it, while e-commerce naturally became increasingly important as physical retail continued dealing with restricted footfall and closures.
For me though, the value of the catwalk has never really been about trying to attach a particular number to one film. It was about what the process taught us.
We had taken something normally dependent on an event, an audience, a large crew and a single fixed moment in time, broken it down into its essential parts and rebuilt it around what was actually possible. The product was still communicated, the different worlds around the consumer groups still felt distinct and the brand still had a moment in which to present what AW20 represented.
We just got there by a completely different route.
