Caroline Belhumeur, chief creative officer of Vince, was on a horseback riding trip in Wyoming last year when she realized the Grand Tetons would make the perfect backdrop for the fall collection.
“I’ve always been obsessed with frontier history,” Belhumeur said in a telephone interview. “Coming from the U.K., I find it intriguing, going off on a journey and the whole epic Oregon trail. I’ve always read a lot of books about it, and it always stuck with me. I also really love the national parks of America and find them incredibly breathtaking. I’m a big horseback rider, so I wanted to do a ‘trail ride up in the mountains’ experience as well.”
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After that horseback trip, she went into designing the fall collection, and that experience influenced both the color palette and design work. When it came time to decide on the ad campaign, she went back to Jackson Hole, Wyo., in June with her team because she felt it would make a great backdrop for the fall collection.
For the shoot, she chose Australian photographer Emma Summerton.
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“I have been following Emma Summerton for a while, I really like her dramatic lighting,” Belhumeur said. “For this incredible landscaping, we needed somebody quite strong in the photography and lighting. I really wanted to work with her, and she’s really great at these epic horizontal shots,” Belhumeur said.
“We wanted to try something quite different for Vince because we’ve done quiet and softer images before. We wanted to experiment with doing something a little more dramatic,” she continued.
The models are Cate Underwood, photographer, DJ and art director of Parisian hot spot Sugaar, and Vincent LaCrocq, a film director.
“The way we’ve played around with textures, and the leathers and tweeds are super lovely. I like the idea of celebrating America’s landscape in the background,” she said. She said she loves the idea “of these sartorial ‘men-sy’ clothes on a posh woman, looking kind of English-y in the West. She’s not rugged woman in Wyoming, but she’s quite polished,” she said.
“It was a lot of fun for us. We enjoyed being outside in this epic landscape. We do a lot of location [shoots] and mostly do them in California. We were excited about taking it on the road,” she said.
Ads will appear on vince.com and in-store, as well as owned social platforms such as Instagram and paid channels across social video platforms.
Among the key looks featured in the campaign are leathers and cashmeres. “It was nice to have suede and leather against this backdrop and some tweed coats. We’ve also got some more feminine pieces. We played a lot with plaids as a theme, and did them in silk dresses and skirts and little bra tops and cardigans,” she said. Men’s fashion includes a plaid short made from bonded wool and plush sherpa and a wide-legged parachute pant.
Vince’s fall budget is about the same as a year ago. “We’re trying to stand out a little bit more and make a little noise. We’ve been quite quiet, we’re ready to come out and have something more to say,” she said.
She said current business is good. “We’re looking forward to the fall because that’s always a big season for us. Sometimes these in-between seasons do really well for us as well,” she said.
Vince currently has 62 stores.
As reported, Vince Holding Corp. continues to advance its transformation strategy, and generated improved profitability in the first quarter amid a sales decline. As reported, net income for the quarter ended May 4 was $4.4 million compared with a net loss of $400,000 a year earlier. Total company net sales declined 7.6 percent to $59.2 million compared to $64.1 million in the year-ago quarter. The company said the decline was expected due to a reduction in promotional activity, which helped margins, as well as a pullback in the off-price business within the wholesale channel. Lower product and freight costs also helped the business.