THE JOURNAL
Images by Mr Joe Mortell
The holiday season is a time for looking back. For a brief time at the end of the year, we put our everyday lives on hold to reunite with old friends, fall back into old habits, revisit old haunts, sing old songs and watch old movies. It’s a festival of nostalgia, a misty-eyed remembrance of the way things were.
Brands know this, which is why you’ll spend the next two months consuming advertising designed to fill you with a yearning for the past. It's a time-honoured technique and it works: there's something about crackling log fires and snowflakes gathering in the corners of old windowpanes that reminds us of a time when we were young, when things were simpler.
Here at MR PORTER, though, we thought we’d do something a little bit different. This year, rather than look to the past for our holiday gifting campaign, we set out to imagine what the festive season might look like in the world of tomorrow. Inspired by the starry-eyed optimism of world’s fairs of the mid-20th century, our New World Of Gifts campaign is a series of fantastical, computer-generated worlds created by London-based 3D artist Mr Joe Mortell.
Creating a campaign of this scale in 3D has its challenges – not least the painstaking rendering of more than 150 individual products – but it also presents new opportunities, especially when compared to physical set design.
“It’s a more open-ended process,” Mortell says. “You can go back and change things without having to rebuild the set.” (Although, he admits that being able to fiddle and tweak endlessly means that it can be difficult to walk away – a quirk that places his chosen artistic medium closer to painting than photography.)
Filled with abstracted natural features such as rocks, clouds and trees, the four worlds that make up MR PORTER’s campaign are surreal, but never sterile. There’s a lived-in quality to Mortell’s work that immediately caught the eye of MR PORTER’s Creative Director Mr Ben Palmer.
“The imagined worlds of science fiction can often feel cold and clinical,” Palmer says. “For our 2021 campaign, we set out to create something otherworldly, but warm and welcoming, too. We wanted these worlds to be somewhere you could feel at home, which is really what the holidays are all about.”
It’s this sense of home that makes these worlds such an ideal backdrop for the focus of our gifting campaign: the gifts. In the Panoramic Penthouse, you’ll find an array of fine watches and jewellery; the Winter Retreat plays host to our most luxurious gifts, along with stylish contemporary homewares; the Park Of All Gifts is where you’ll find smaller, stocking-stuffer items and classic leather goods; and the Streetscape Of Tomorrow offers up cult collectibles and streetwear from some of the world’s most sought-after brands.
We’ll be revealing more of the campaign as the festive season draws nearer, beginning tomorrow with our edit of the 10 best gifts for the home. For now, though, we’re leaving you to gaze at more of Mortell’s beautifully realised worlds.