K. RaShaé is a luxury womenswear label founded by Kalisha Hall, now Kalisha Price, who is my wife. I led creative direction across five seasons: brand system, campaign, editorial photography, and web.
The label's mantra is Fearfully and Wonderfully Made®. The clothes are avant-garde translated into wearable, built on tailoring, bold prints, and texture.
In 2016 I wrote the brand guidelines, and the useful part is not the logo pages.
Editorial photography: women portrayed powerfully through strong emotion and dramatic but natural poses. Black and white with a slight blue cast for a steel-like hue, chosen because it reads as strength and endurance. High contrast, deep blacks, strong highlights to bring out the tailoring.
E-commerce photography: color, low saturation, cool temperature, white to semi-white background at zero to five percent black.
Two treatments for two jobs. Editorial has to make you feel something. E-commerce has to tell you what you are buying. Fashion brands collapse these constantly and end up with product shots that are moody and unreadable.
The guidelines also specify the site behavior: a home page that is only the anthem film in a lightbox, and a lookbook built from editorial photography with documented hover states and transitions. Written as numbered states, in 2016.
The debut collection needed a debut. I produced it.
It was not a runway show. Runways move people past clothes at walking speed and give you about eight seconds a look. For a first collection nobody had seen, that is the wrong format.
Instead I built a tiered platform in the center of the room, lit from inside, and the models stood on it. The audience moved, not the clothes. People walked up, circled, and looked closely at construction, fabric, and fit, which is what a first collection has to be judged on.
The walls carried the rest of the argument. Projected portraits of the models at architectural scale, each tied to who she was and what she had come through. The brand's mantra is Fearfully and Wonderfully Made®. A runway strips people down to bodies carrying fabric. This did the opposite: the garments were at eye level and the women were twelve feet tall.
The platform did double duty. At intermission it turned red and Meredith Ezinma Ramsay, the violinist who has toured with Beyoncé, performed on it.
The Lightbox, New York, April 2016, at capacity. Rashad Jennings, Angela Simmons, and others from fashion and entertainment in the room. For a label showing its first collection, that is a room you have to earn.
Concept, creative direction, staging and set design, run of show, production management, model and talent direction, music, lighting, video, and every piece of collateral from the invitation forward.
The campaign photography ran alongside it. Studio editorial, steel-toned, a single figure against draped and textured backdrops. Restrained and confident, and it matches the written direction exactly.
Shown at Style Fashion Week during New York Fashion Week, September 2016.
The collection was about the fight women have with their own confidence. Nothing in the garments says boxing. That was the decision.
Wrapped hands, red gloves, a heavy bag, two models styled as opponents, one garment printed with newspaper text. I directed the film and the stills together on the same set, so the campaign moved and held still in the same language.
A jacket from this collection appeared in the 2017 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, photographed by Ruven Afanador in Mexico.
The collection was named Masterpiece, so we shot the garments as art objects: gilded picture frames, model stepping through and around them, black textured wall.
Paris. The collection showed on March 4, 2017 at L'Hôtel d'Evreux on Place Vendôme, as part of Oxford Fashion Studio's Paris Collections during Paris Fashion Week. Sixteen designers, twenty-four models, 127 looks across four runway shows in a single day.
We travelled as four: Kalisha, two stylists, and me. Oxford Fashion Studio ran the production. I directed ours, and the segment opened the way every season did, with the film.
That is why the films matter. They are not campaign assets that also exist. The film plays in the dark, states the concept, and then the models walk out into it. By the time the first look hits the floor the room already knows what the collection is arguing.
A retrospective season. We rebuilt silhouettes from previous collections and shot them fresh, with Vanessa Simmons fronting the campaign.
Four seasons in, the label had a problem worth solving. K. RaShaé was built as luxury, and luxury is a narrow room. The customer who loved the clothes wanted to wear them more than twice a year.
So we repositioned it. New name, new logo, new look, and a shift from luxury to comfortable ready-to-wear.
For the launch shoot I wrote the brief around a product truth rather than a mood. A socialite comes home from an event and winds down. Shoes come off, makeup comes off, the clothes come off last. That is how you show comfort without saying the word.
Two complete identity systems for the same label, four years apart, built for two different businesses. The first had to make a debut collection feel inevitable. The second had to make it wearable on a Tuesday.
WWD covered K. RaShaé in its Spring 2017 ready-to-wear runway coverage from Los Angeles, in the same season roster as Tommy Hilfiger, Rebecca Minkoff, and Adidas by Stella McCartney.
The label showed during New York, Los Angeles, and Paris Fashion Weeks across these seasons, including Oxford Fashion Studio's Paris Collections at L'Hôtel d'Evreux, Place Vendôme, in March 2017. A Versus jacket appeared in the 2017 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, photographed by Ruven Afanador.
Credits: Founded by Kalisha Hall, now Kalisha Price. I served as Creative Director across five seasons.
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