As summer 2023 waned, A$AP Rocky blossomed. The perpetually stylish Mr. Rihanna suddenly became ubiquitous: snapped near-daily by paparazzi, Rocky looked consistently sharp in outfits as disparate as grandpa sweater + dad jeans and all-leather tracksuits. Usually, he just so happened to be wearing Bottega Veneta shoes or clutching the house's newest bag.
It was a good look for Rocky. Heck, it was a lot of good looks. And, in December, it was revealed to be one-half of fashion's best viral marketing campaign in recent memory.
Bottega Veneta's shrewd stunt was the pinnacle of recent subliminal celebrity marketing efforts. It was a landmark moment that instantly inspired imitators. It was also not the first of its kind.
Still, the novelty of celebrity-paparazzi-shoot-as-marketing-push felt new and thus spurred imitators.
Ariana Grande used the technique to promote her new album in early January 2024, for instance.
A few weeks later, Italian luxury label GCDS followed Bottega's lead by partnering with paparazzi photo agency Backgrid for images positioning GCDS-clad models as A-listers out in LA (and at Sushi Park, no less).
The unpretentious feel of Marc Jacobs' Spring 2024 campaign was more down to photographer Juergen Teller's point-n-shoot technique than paparazzi cues but the impromptu street setting and insouciant subjects hit a comparable note.
Even party-ready clothing label Poster Girl tapped into the uncanniness of it all with a campaign that mimicked famous folks en-route to court, except with a lot more bare skin.
The appeal of the paparazzi-style fashion campaign is obvious enough: it exposes, inverts, and riffs on the artifice that is the complex relationship between celebrities and the people who photograph them.
"Even down to the rights and the usage of photos, and the tabloid hustle, there’s always seemed to be a disconnection between famous people and the photographers who follow & film them," Rocky himself explained when his Bottega Veneta campaign launched. "Certain celebrities call paparazzi on themselves... a very small few, such as myself, don’t mind, as long as they post the good angles, of course."
Done right, these shoots are a betrayal of the best kind. They're as much commentary on celebrity culture as they are bending it to their whims. They're organically inorganic, a juxtaposition that makes them all the more engaging as a result.
The sorta shoots are arguably more genuine than actual paparazzi photos, even. They may be trying to sell product but you at least know that that celeb was paid to participate.
In the real world, anything goes. Did a stylist assemble that look? What brand paid to get their clothes in the mix? Was this a pre-planned pap shoot for publicity's sake?
Authenticity is key. And so it was in two of the premiere paparazzi photoshoots of our time, both of which predated the 2023 Bottega Veneta campaign by nearly a half-decade.
Balenciaga's Spring 2018 campaign was perhaps the first contemporary luxury fashion campaign to riff on the paparazzi-celebrity dichotomy.
But unlike Bottega Veneta, which concealed its purpose 'til the end, Balenciaga did not mask its purpose. This was merely a fashion shoot with tabloid trappings.
Still, Balenciaga deserves more credit for its influence than it actually receives. Its Fall 2024 runway show, held in Los Angeles and accented with Erewhon cups, felt like the house restating its authority on the subject of pop culture-inflected fashion.
But Balenciaga isn't always first.
In December 2017, a remarkably forward-thinking YEEZY campaign erupted across social media.
Therein, Kim Kardashian and an army of mostly-famous Kim Klones simultaneously posted to Instagram desaturated images of themselves wearing then-unreleased YEEZY athleisure and sneakers.
This was the YEEZY SEASON 6 campaign's official premiere. In the months prior, though, paparazzi had lensed Kim on a regular basis — turns out, she'd been wearing the new YEEZY gear long before it all had been revealed as a ruse.
This two-pronged approach was the earliest and most obvious contemporary example of the semi-organic celebrity marketing ploy as we now know it.
As such, I'd argue that credit for the paprazzi fashion campaign is split.
YEEZY shaped the premise; Balenciaga codified paparazzi pictures as fashion editorial; Bottega Veneta perfected the presentation.
They made tremendous waves in their own way; YEEZY and Bottega because each rug-pull was so satisfyingly surprising and Balenciaga because it presented its expensive clothes as just that: clothes.
The effectiveness of these campaigns is down to the ruse of presenting promotional outfits as seemingly legit looks — it's both a pleasant shock and a humanizing of the clothes therein. These aren't just products, they're real things that real people with real taste really wear.
And, yet, the stealth paparazzi campaign is so dependent on its benign deceit that it can't really be replicated, not without weakening its effectiveness.
Fool me twice and all that.
