Is This the Most Artsy, Ethereal Retail Campaign of All Time?

Simons says 'Dress Yourself' in dreamy film by Scouts Honour

Twentysomethings—most baring lots of taught skin—run, bike and gyrate across the city (and even climb skyscraper walls) as stylish shirts, jackets and pants fall around them like manna from heaven.

Now, if this sounds like a ridiculously pretentious advert—well, yes, in fact it is. There’s all manner of slick camera angles, abundant slow-mo and pouty orgasm faces on display.

Trance-dance soundtrack? Check! Courtesy of “Just Stand There” by Fred Again & SOAK.

And yet … I’ll be darned, but the two-and-a-half-minute “Dress Yourself” film for Simons stores, delivered by Scouts Honor director Mark Zibert, proves potently hypnotic.

There’s a lightness and playful aspect that wafts through these frames. It shouldn’t really work so well. But it manages to spark the imagination, like a colorful scarf wafting in the breeze, catching the sunlight as it sparkles.

Oops, I slipped into the artsy spirit. Just watch:

Call it urban whimsy. Equal parts fantasy and sun-splashed cement with a music video vibe.

“Once we assembled our incredible cast, we got to work with our stunt, SFX and choreography team to build out the movements, identifying interesting and unique ways to capture the engagement with the clothing,” Simon Dragland, executive producer at Scouts Honour, tells Muse.

“Every performer brought something different to the table and by the time we arrived on the ground in Cape Town, we had a pretty good library of motion that needed to be refined for camera,” he recalls.

The crew spent four days rehearsing on stage to get the action just right, using trampolines and other apparatus.

“Our SFX team worked out different methods of incorporating the clothing in situ,” Dragland says. “They used incredibly long extension arms to puppeteer the clothing in conjunction with multiple wind machines.

“We absolutely overstuffed our shoot days and had as many as six cameras rolling at any given time. Mark likes to get as much in-camera as possible, so we had a lot of clothes flying practically in the scenes and captured a lot of plate shots” for use in post.

Dominik Bochenski at Tantrum VFX and Graham Chisholm at Nimiopere Editorial helped steer the visual approach. Eric Kaskens served as co-DP.

The work dropped last week across video, social (with many snackable edits in the mix) and OOH.