Curated Film

Fashion Film Focus: An Interview with Blink Fish

MILAN FASHION WEEK has come and gone, but the continued excitement of the season presses on, bringing a RUSH OF CREATIVE OUTPUT FROM DESIGNERS ALL AROUND THE WORLD. THE FASHION Month MADNESS EXTENDS FAR BEYOND THE CATWALK AS CREATIVES CRAFT WORK ACROSS MEDIUMS. TAKE, FOR EXAMPLE, HOTEL MFW, THE LATEST FASHION FILM DIRECTED FOR THE NATIONAL CHAMBER OF ITALIAN FASHION (CNMI) BY THE BLINK FISH.

The project, entitled MFW Hotel and directed by Giacomo Boeri and Matteo Grimaldi, features Anina Kokorina. NJAL Contributor Niccolò Montanari sat down to interview The Blink Fish to learn more about the captivating piece. 

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Compared to your previous projects together, the story here plays a major role. What has led you to take this direction?

Storytelling has always been part of our DNA, but recently and especially when it comes to fashion film, we just haven't been able to work on a project with this approach. With Hotel MFW we’ve finally managed to convey a real message and in a way that we’ve truly enjoyed. This film has been the most recent step in a wonderful journey with CNMI during which we realized that focusing solely on the aesthetic of a film just wasn’t enough any more; we needed work on something deeper and more elaborate. We believe that having a narrative element or at least a strong message behind the film will help with the distribution, making the film more memorable. 

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The video tells the story of a hotel filled with wonderful and unique characters, celebrating the arrival of Milan Fashion Week. Its aesthetic has been compared to Tim Burton’s work. What has been your inspiration?

We weren’t inspired by just one thing. We started off with the claim Proud to be a Freak, which led us to work with unique and irreplaceable characters who generally would have been marginalized because of how remarkable they are. That’s why our aim was to celebrate their uniqueness, which is actually their key to their beauty. They may be atypical but they are proud of who they are. 

Inclusivity, diversity and uniqueness are values strongly promoted by CNMI and form the core of Hotel MFW. What has been the creative journey to convey them into the fashion film? 

I can’t think of anyone better than CNMI, an organization that is a reference point in the world of fashion, as the bearer of such a strong message. Fashion stands for revolution, evolution and uniqueness, and it’s certainly a most fertile ground to celebrate diversity. We’ve been very fortunate to find in CNMI an open mind (wide open) and enough courage to embrace change. The hardest part has been translating this into a fashion film, which has its own rules and restrictions. We’ve worked scene by scene looking to tell the story of each character. Even though we don’t see any of them for longer than three to four seconds, the context and their actions are enough to develop the story and go beyond the simple image. 

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The Blink Fish produce a wide range of video content across advertising, branded content, short films and music videos. Nonetheless, you have a strong presence in the world of fashion. Why did you decide to concentrate on this industry? And what can we expect from you in the future?

The Blink Fish has at its core the desire to create content with a strong narrative component, while paying particular attention to how something looks and feels. The world of fashion fits very well with our requirements, even though to be honest we kind of ended up working in it almost by chance. Over time we realized that fashion was the only route that allowed us to undo the traditional and bulky barriers found in advertising and work in a truly creative manner. This means inventing rather than copying.

In the future we’d love to develop our narrative side even further, both with personal projects (which we publish every year independently), as well as through our advertising work. We don’t really know what will happen in the next few years, but we are always ready to change and evolve. Our only certainty is that we want to make every project unique and unrepeatable. 

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