After six years at Superdry, there was something about AW22 Party that felt like the Superdry I remembered when I first joined.
Some of those earlier campaigns had carried a huge sense of energy around them, not just because of the budget, the talent or where we were shooting, but because people genuinely wanted to be part of making them. There was a buzz within the creative teams and a feeling that everyone was trying to make something better than what had come before. Somewhere along the way I felt some of that had been lost, but AW22 Party felt like an opportunity to find it again.
By that point, a large part of what I was trying to do as a leader was prove that the creative talent already sitting inside Superdry was capable of owning some of the brand’s biggest campaigns. We had an incredibly talented internal team of directors, filmmakers, photographers, designers and art directors who spent every day inside the brand, understood its history and worked closely with the people responsible for everything from product and styling through to social and marketing.
Yet when the really significant campaigns arrived, there was still a tendency to look externally.
That was never because the external directors and production teams weren’t good enough. Quite the opposite. I had worked with some genuinely brilliant people through Superdry, many of whom I learnt from and some of whom remain friends today. My frustration was simply that I believed the internal creative team deserved the same opportunity to prove itself.
There is enormous value in bringing an outside perspective into a brand, but there is also enormous value in people who understand its DNA because they live inside it every day. They know why something feels right and, perhaps more importantly, why something doesn’t. I wanted our creative team to become that expression of Superdry, not simply the people who executed work once the direction had been decided, but a group trusted to help define what the best version of the brand could look like.
A huge influence on that mentality was Phil Dickinson, and you will probably find his name appearing throughout these Insights because Phil fundamentally changed the way I thought about creative leadership. He had a phrase that has stayed with me ever since:
“Shit or Cool. ALWAYS!”
It sounds almost ridiculous written down, but the principle behind it was incredibly powerful. Don’t hide behind hierarchy, don’t protect an idea because the person who came up with it is senior and don’t allow something average through because challenging it would make the meeting uncomfortable. Look at the work, ask whether it is good enough and, if it isn’t, push it.
Phil could turn working together into this strange kind of friendly competition where you wanted to bring something better because you knew somebody else would. Ideas got challenged, assumptions got questioned and nobody should have been precious about being told something wasn’t there yet. That mentality became a huge part of how I wanted the team around me to operate.
At the time, I didn’t always feel that mentality was being demonstrated consistently from the top down. That isn’t about blaming individuals, but I felt the structure around the creative department could sometimes make it easier to play safely than to fight for the strongest expression of the brand. I wanted our team to operate differently, and AW22 gave us the opportunity to prove what that could look like.
Two of the big commercial pillars for Superdry had traditionally been outerwear and the party period. Jackets and coats were synonymous with the brand, while Christmas and New Year’s Eve had always created a natural opportunity around womenswear, but for AW22 Party was becoming something much more deliberate.
Kelsang Dongsar was developing the art direction and campaign strategy around The Party Dress Code, with the ambition of expanding Superdry’s position within dresses rather than simply treating partywear as another seasonal product drop. The decision was then made to put those major AW22 campaigns into the hands of the internal creative team, supported by external production where we needed specialist crew and scale.
For us, that felt significant because this was the opportunity we had been asking for. We were still working with a serious production budget, around £200,000 from my memory, but by placing the creative ownership internally we could remove many of the external directing and creative fees that would normally have sat on top of a production of this scale. From our calculations at the time, we believed we could deliver something around half the cost of the model we had previously been using while still putting the production value on screen.
More importantly, it meant the people who understood the brand were finally being trusted with it.
The campaigns were divided across the team, with Euan Wallace and Morgan Church leading the AW22 Jackets work, while Hasan Bitirim, James Camp and myself came together on Party. Again, roles mattered less to me than putting people where their strengths could have the biggest impact on the work.
Hasan and James were both placed in roles that played perfectly to their strengths. Hasan took the Director role, while James stepped into Director of Photography, and together they created a balance that immediately felt right for the campaign. Hasan could concentrate on performance, movement and the overall direction of the film, while James focused on how that world translated through the camera, with my role as Assistant Director helping create the structure around them so each person could do their job properly.
It was less about hierarchy and more about making sure everyone was positioned where they could have the biggest impact on the work.
From there, we began planning everything in detail. Long before I eventually moved formally into production roles later in my career, I had always approached shoots with a producer’s mentality. I like knowing what could go wrong before it does and I want the logistics, timings, movement and communication solved as far as possible before the first person walks onto set, not because I want a rigid shoot, but almost the opposite.
I have always believed that the more prepared everyone is beforehand, the more freedom you create when the camera starts rolling. If people aren’t worrying about what happens next, they can be present. The director can direct, the DOP can concentrate on the image and the models can enjoy themselves, and on something called Party, that mattered enormously because the film couldn’t simply show people wearing dresses in an impressive room. It needed to feel like somewhere you genuinely wanted to be.
Hasan, James and Kelsang spent weeks developing what that world should feel like, with movement becoming central to the idea and influencing the casting as much as appearance. We needed five models who could not only wear the product brilliantly, but move, dance and respond naturally to choreography, while James began developing how the cinematography could live within that movement rather than simply observe it.
His experience and knowledge as a DOP became a huge part of the visual identity of the campaign.
James developed the camera and lens approach around the Sony Venice and ARRI Signature Primes, deliberately moving away from longer, more conventional fashion portraiture and exploring a much wider perspective. He worked across 12mm, 18mm, 21mm and 24/25mm focal lengths, with the 12mm ultimately becoming a major part of the finished film.
That decision wasn’t simply about finding something visually different. James had looked at the movement Hasan wanted from the models, the atmosphere Kelsang was building and the locations we had chosen, and found a camera language that allowed all of those elements to work together.
We had spent time finding locations with so much character that it would have been a waste to compress them into backgrounds. The Bentley and The Columbia in London gave us rich interiors, corridors, rooms, textures and architectural details, and James’s decision to work so wide allowed those spaces to become part of the action rather than simply somewhere the action happened.
The models could move towards and around the camera while the environment stayed alive around them, giving the film this sense that the camera itself was another person inside the party.
Working that wide naturally came with its own production challenges because the camera could see almost everything, leaving far fewer places for lighting, grip and the wider machinery of the set to disappear. James later spoke about how much of a challenge that created for Matt Nolan and the lighting team, particularly whenever the 12mm was being used, but that became part of what made the approach so effective.
James’s knowledge and experience had led him to a visual language that gave the film something distinctive, while Matt and the wider lighting team had the expertise to solve the challenges that came with it. For me, it was another example of why having the right people in the right roles mattered so much. Everyone had ownership of their discipline, but all of those individual decisions were feeding back into the same creative idea.
That was exactly the culture I wanted around the team, specialists with the space to push their own areas, challenge each other and collectively make the work stronger.
The music was receiving the same level of attention. We went back to Oli Pearson and OPM, who we had worked with previously, because we didn’t want the campaign’s energy to come from finding a stock track at the end of the edit. The soundtrack needed to belong to the world we were building.
We talked about the warmth and movement of 1970s disco while bringing an electronic edge into it so it didn’t become pastiche. There was something in the energy of Jamiroquai that kept coming up in those conversations, that combination of disco, funk and something much more contemporary, and OPM brought Kieran Seebach into the project to create a bespoke composition for the film.
By that point, direction, cinematography, casting, choreography, styling, location and music were starting to feed into the same idea, with specialists taking ownership of their individual areas rather than every decision coming from one place.
Once we reached the shoot, my role shifted from helping build that structure into protecting it.
On paper I was the Assistant Director, but in reality the thing I cared most about was creating the conditions in which everyone could do the jobs we had spent weeks preparing them for. There were five models, multiple outfit changes, choreography, two locations, a sizeable crew and a huge amount of product that needed to be covered across the two days, with every department naturally needing something from the same limited amount of time.
That is where communication on a fashion set can become difficult.
One of the things I have always been conscious of is what happens when too many people begin directing talent. An art director sees something, styling needs an adjustment, the client wants another version, photography has an idea and somebody beside the monitor asks a model to turn slightly before somebody else asks them to move back.
Every one of those comments might be completely valid on its own, but suddenly the model has six different voices giving them six slightly different interpretations of what the shot should be, and the person you appointed as director is no longer actually directing.
For me, part of being a strong AD was preventing that ambiguity and protecting Hasan’s relationship with the talent. If Kelsang, James, myself or anyone else had something we felt needed changing, the communication had to flow through the right people so Hasan remained in control of performance, while James had the space to focus on the cinematography with his camera and lighting teams.
That does not mean shutting down collaboration, it means creating a structure that allows collaboration to work properly, and there is a huge difference between the two. Good sets can contain dozens of incredibly talented people, but that doesn’t mean every person should speak at exactly the same time.
My role was constantly moving between those worlds, understanding what Hasan needed next, what James and the camera department were preparing, where styling was with the following look, whether talent understood what was happening, where we were losing time and where we might be able to find some of it again.
Because so much preparation had happened beforehand, that movement could stay fluid and the energy started feeding back into the images. That was the part I had always believed in most strongly, because when a production is properly planned it doesn’t necessarily feel more controlled. In many ways, it can feel less controlled because people relax when they trust the structure underneath them.
The talent can enjoy what they are doing rather than constantly waiting for somebody to decide what happens next and, when you are trying to create a film about people having a genuinely great night together, you can see that difference through the lens.
Across those two days it began to feel like the thing we had been talking about for years was actually happening. An internal creative team wasn’t being allowed to make a smaller version of a major campaign, we were making the major campaign itself, with Hasan leading the direction and performance, James bringing his extensive cinematography knowledge to the visual language, Kelsang shaping the wider creative world and myself running the floor alongside them.
Around us we had Maria Dawkins and The Production Factory helping give the idea the production infrastructure it required, alongside external camera, lighting, grip, styling, casting, hair, make-up and post-production teams brought in because they were specialists in exactly what we needed.
That distinction was important to me because internal ownership never meant doing absolutely everything internally. It meant knowing what should remain close to the brand and knowing when to bring brilliant external people into that team.
There can sometimes be a tendency when businesses talk about bringing work in-house to make the conversation purely about cost, but this wasn’t that. Cost mattered, of course, and we had a responsibility to show that this model could make commercial sense, but the bigger argument was that an internal team with genuine brand knowledge, supported by the right external specialists, could produce work at the same level while creating a much closer connection between the idea, the product and the business.
By the end of the second day, before anybody had even properly started finishing the film, it already felt like we had proved something.
James then moved into the offline edit, and because he had shaped so much of the cinematography from the beginning, he had an unusually intimate understanding of the material he was cutting. He knew why particular focal lengths had been chosen, why the camera had moved in certain ways, which pieces of choreography had been designed to connect and where he had deliberately captured transitions that could later help build pace through the edit.
Rather than simply receiving a collection of footage and finding a sequence afterwards, James was editing material he had already been thinking about visually before and during the shoot. The cinematography and edit could therefore speak to one another, with the movement created in-camera carrying through into the rhythm of the finished film.
From there, the work passed into the finishing process, including colour with Lucrezia Pollice at The Mill, allowing everything that had been built through Kelsang’s art direction, Hasan’s direction, James’s cinematography and the work of the wider team to come together in the final campaign.
By the time the campaign was out in the world, it was clear the response had gone beyond us simply feeling like we had made something strong. The Party Dress Code went on to reach close to 22 million video views and the partywear content became a real moment for the brand, helping Superdry establish much more credibility in a category it had not always been associated with.
What really mattered to me though was seeing that response translate commercially. The party dresses became one of the standout parts of the AW22 season and the momentum around the campaign contributed to a 31% increase in sales across the category.
That was the bit that really completed the story for me because, as creative teams, it is easy to get caught up in whether we liked the work, whether leadership liked it or whether it looked good in a reel, but ultimately this was a commercial fashion campaign and it needed to do more than just look good. It needed to make people see the product differently, want it and, ideally, buy it.
For me, that is where the campaign became proof of everything we had been arguing for. The internal team had been given ownership of one of the brand’s key seasonal moments, we had delivered it within the budget we had been given and the work had gone on to create both cultural traction and a measurable commercial return.
Looking back, AW22 Party remains one of the Superdry projects I am proudest to have been part of, not just because of the finished film, but because of what the production represented for the team and what happened when that trust was finally put into practice.
For years I had been fighting for the idea that the creative team inside the brand was capable of more than simply servicing someone else’s vision, and when the opportunity finally arrived we didn’t need to become an external agency or borrow somebody else’s creative identity. We needed trust, the right people in the right roles, enough budget to execute the idea properly and the confidence to hold ourselves to exactly the same standard we would have expected from anybody brought in from outside.
Phil’s voice was probably somewhere in the back of my mind throughout all of it.
Shit or Cool. ALWAYS.
AW22 Party was our opportunity to find out, and for me, it was cool.
