For Matsuda's Autumn / Winter 2023 collection the goal was to design an eyewear collection that aligned with a bespoke marketing campaign to launch with it, as opposed to an "evergreen" campaign like "Exercices De Composition." This is a particularly challenging project as production for this quality eyewear from Japan had over a year lead time, so aligning a marketing production schedule along with a product production release schedule was a sizable task. Furthermore, Japan regularly delayed production so these large marketing production projects had to be especially nimble. I worked side by side with the CEO and owner of the brand to conceive "Gothic Nouveau" and personally managed the entirety of the project both on the product design and marketing campaign side. Inspired by the technical bravado of gothic architecture which enamored Mitsuhiro Matsuda on his first journey to Europe, this aligned with our brand pillar of treating everything like a fine art project. We designed incredibly intricate metal eyewear featuring stained glass inspired lacquer and cathedral shaped pince-nez style bridges. To market it, we created an extremely detailed and large paper board gothic cathedral façade out of dozens of layers of paper board stacked on top of each other. By scaling the façade to a size that fit the eyewear cozily in it's doorways we played with perception adding a surreal effect to the photography. We then setup the façade in studio, adding three dimensional aspects such as a pedestal and numerous arches behind the front facade and reflected light in a variety of different ways on the boards to bring them to life. Although not every aspect of this project made it to social media, it was largely used in trade shows worldwide like SILMO.
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