A tailor's craft in most unlikely places

medialifemagazine.com

Alternative media
A tailor's craft in most unlikely places
By Diego Vasquez
Apr 24, 2008 - 3:41:52 PM

We may think of custom tailoring as for those with perfect bodies who want to show off what God's blessed them with.

Actually, the brilliance of custom tailoring is quite the opposite. It's to make one's imperfections less noticeable, and the best at it are masters of nipping and tucking and sewing this and that to hide less-attractive features like tummy rolls and bulging necks.

That was exactly the point of an alternative campaign in Zurich for Artesano Camiseros, a Swiss tailor, which puts its custom-made shirts on public display in the capital city.

Here's the catch. The shirts were not put on your typical mannequins but on an assortment of trees, fire hydrants and water fountains.

The thinking as explained by Keith Loell, creative director at Draftfcb Switzerland, the agency that came up with the campaign: "If these guys can actually make nice shirts for these weird shapes, then they should have no problem with your short waist, extra-long arms or fat neck," says Loell.

The fact is, as Loell notes, people come in a variety of shapes, and Artesano Camiseros can tailor to any and all.

Here's how the idea came about.

"Fernando Perez, the art director, and I were walking around the city at lunch one day and we noticed that the fire hydrants looked like squat little men," Loell says. "So we took a picture of it with our cell-phone camera, found a few other things like the tree and light pole, and then went back to the office."

Then the tailors at Artesano Camiseros set about to make shirts to fit these makeshift mannequins. The shirts were placed around banks and other financial businesses to target that market, and they include removable tags that double as 10-percent-off coupons.

The campaign ran last year and will run again next month. Loell says the agency had designed poster and brochure ads for Artesano Camiseros for years.