Tomorrow Bureau's visuals for Kenzo SS19 are inspired by ritual and communion

With a starting point of “celebration, community and optimism”, Tomorrow Bureau has created a series of beautifully slick in-store visuals for Kenzo’s SS19 collection. Featuring three distinct “spaces” conceptualised from these themes, the result is a “surreal, exploratory journey” through various worlds which place ritual and communion at the heart.

Tomorrow Bureau is actually the sister company to Studio Creme, a studio you may remember for its mysticism and folklore-inspired campaign for Heresy. “Tomorrow Bureau was born from the realisation that Studio Creme had evolved into an agency that created two distinct kinds of work, each with a singular approach and vision,” explains James Earls, one-half of the double studio alongside Jack Featherstone. On the one hand, the pair were creating future-facing, experimental moving image work. “On the other,” James continues, “a strong focus on design and brand storytelling. To give both of these room to breathe and evolve independently we decided to create Tomorrow Bureau as a new space for our moving image work to live.”

Having seen the duo’s work on previous projects, Kenzo got in contact with James and Jack directly, setting them a brief which involved bringing its latest collection to life. The challenge, James tells us, was to combine the themes of celebration, community and optimism with “the patterns and motifs of the season in an unexpected way, without feeling too forced”.

Alongside the Kenzo team, Tomorrow Bureau settled on a concept which sees three distinct spaces visualised, each featuring an altar or shrine on which offerings are being made. The first, titled Phoenix, is a temple-like room in which the idea was “for it to feel as if an intense ritual had just taken place and we were now witnessing the quiet aftermath, with smoke still billowing from out from within the shrine.”

The second, Rave, sees a large industrial club with a central pyramid structure. “This space was intended to evoke the spirit of early nineties super club raving but with a touch of glamour,” James outlines. And finally, Spring was created with a Japanese temple as its inspiration. “Nature was fundamental here, so we placed emphasis on elemental features such as the pond with stepping stones and the wind through the drapes,” he continues. “There were lots of flowers in this space too as always with Kenzo!”

The result is a film which is not only perfectly suited to a brand such as Kenzo, but which is entirely captivating. Full of colour and “quite maximal stylistically”, it shows how design, 3D and motion can bring to life the essence of a brand, creating new worlds in which it can live.