AUTOMOTIVE, FASHION, PRODUCTION

BTS : WHEN IN BAVARIA

How we planned and did this year’s Dirndl-Shooting. You can also find this article on DRIVETRIBE.

A new approach of catching the essence of ‘Bavarian culture’ seemed to be a good idea in these days. This year we wanted to do something more modern… in the spirit of overcoming stereotypes and outdated labels. First thing we did: Get rid of the alcohol. Next thing we did: get rid of the Dirndl-dresses, the alps, the curvy roads and the pricy cabriolets. So, we ended up with a very true-to-reality concept of some dreary fashion photographed in Nuremburg. Technically this does count as ‘Bavaria’… As much as Lunel is part of the Côte d’Azur and Glasgow is in Scotland. The geography might be accurate from a political perspective (and therefor be worthy of recognition) but visually… well… everyone not living there would expect something else, when talking about these places and their surrounding countryside.

After some ambitious but pointless efforts of making a go of it, we ditched the getting-rid-of-approach and re-introduced the pricy cabriolets, the dirndl-dresses and obviously: the mountain-backroads in the Bavarian alps. Also: we tried to improve the fuel consumption: got a smaller engine (instead of the old Merc’V8 a turbocharged 4-cylinder BMW) and more potent high-octane fuel (gin instead of beer). The beautiful Dirndl dresses are from CocoVero.

Only thing we now had to do was somehow joining everything together and still be appropriate for our planned narrative. This meant a huge deal of location scouting and somehow combine the very limited perspectives from which the orange 4 series cabriolet is appealing with the possible positions in front of our preferred backgrounds. Considering the very tight scheduling on the actual production day – and the possibility that we might have to shoot on a rainy day – we ended up with a highly complex planned concept.

On the production day, everything did go down smoothly. We actually were quite fast and managed to pull off the shooting in the scheduled timeslot. Which was good news, since soon after we were done, heavy rain started pouring down on us.