In praise of things that take time
Why craft, nostalgia and imperfection are becoming the new visual language of luxury
I spend a lot of time researching visual references.
Somewhere between campaign archives, product still lifes and endless folders of imagery, the same kinds of objects keep resurfacing.
time and luxury time and luxury apple headphones and product photography chanel
Wired Apple headphones. Books. Paper. Flowers. Handwriting. Old cameras. Objects that are scratched, folded, tangled or visibly touched.
None of them are particularly luxurious.
And yet they keep finding their way into luxury imagery.
The wired headphones are perhaps the strangest example.
Technology spent years trying to eliminate that wire. It tangled in our bags, caught on our clothes and generally made life less convenient. AirPods solved the problem.
Yet aesthetically, the wire has survived.
In a still life, it loops around a perfume bottle. It crosses a book. It hangs imperfectly from a coat. It interrupts an otherwise pristine composition.
The inconvenience has become the aesthetic.
And I don’t think we’re really nostalgic for headphones.
I think we’re nostalgic for evidence of life.
The return of friction
There is something connecting all of these references.
A book requires turning pages. Film has grain. Flowers decay. A wire tangles. Paint reveals the hand that painted it. Clay carries fingerprints. Stop-motion requires someone to move an object, frame by frame by frame.
They all contain friction.
And friction is becoming increasingly rare.
We live inside systems designed to remove it. Everything is faster, smoother, cleaner and more immediate. Images can be generated in seconds. Products arrive the next day. Interfaces anticipate what we want before we ask for it. Imperfections can disappear with a click.
We have become very good at making things effortless.
Which may be exactly why effort has become so compelling.
There is something deeply attractive about encountering an object or image and immediately understanding:
Someone spent time on this.
Someone cared enough to make it slowly.
Luxury has always sold time
This isn’t entirely new.
Luxury has always been connected to time.
The hours required to embroider a garment. The years needed to master leatherwork. The precision of watchmaking. A perfume developed through countless iterations. A piece of glass shaped by someone who has spent decades understanding the material.
Part of what we value in these objects is invisible.
It is the time embedded within them.
But something interesting happens when we translate that idea into the visual world.
Industrialisation made identical objects inexpensive. Digital technology made identical images inexpensive. And now generative technology is making visual perfection abundant.
When perfection becomes easy to produce, perfection alone becomes less interesting.
The scarce thing becomes evidence of attention.
A hand-drawn line carries something a perfectly rendered line cannot. Not because it is technically superior, but because we can imagine the person behind it.
A tiny irregularity becomes proof of presence.
Perhaps this is why luxury is returning so visibly to craft.
The human hand as a medium
Some of the most beautiful luxury campaigns today don’t simply depict craftsmanship. Their production itself becomes an act of craftsmanship.
Fashion houses collaborate with illustrators, painters, animators, sculptors and artisans to create worlds that could have been produced much more efficiently another way.
Sometimes that inefficiency is precisely the point.
A sequence created frame by frame communicates something before we even understand what we are looking at.
This took time.
The medium becomes part of the message.
In a culture increasingly fascinated by speed, choosing the slower route can become an expression of confidence.
It says that efficiency wasn’t the only consideration.
Beauty mattered too.
Nostalgia is part of it, but not all of it
Hunter and Florence BTS Hunter and Florence BTS
Hunter and Florene BTS shot
It would be easy to describe this simply as nostalgia.
And nostalgia is certainly present.
We are seeing old cameras, wired headphones, analog textures, archival typography and visual references from recent decades return to brand worlds.
But nostalgia looks backward.
Craft makes us conscious of time.
That distinction feels important.
Perhaps we aren’t longing for a particular decade as much as we are responding to objects that remind us of a less frictionless relationship with the world.
The physicality of a book.
The unpredictability of film.
The temporary beauty of flowers.
The inconvenience of a cable.
The texture of paper.
The irregularity of handwriting.
Things that have to be touched, maintained, carried, waited for or allowed to age.
They remind us that someone was here.
Objects are vocabulary
This is what makes the wired headphones interesting to me as an art direction object.
Take them away from a still life and the composition might become cleaner.
But it may also become less alive.
The cable creates a line. It loops around products, disappears behind objects and reappears somewhere unexpected. It introduces controlled chaos into a composition.
More importantly, it creates character.
A laptop, glasses, perfume, hand cream, a paperback and tangled headphones aren’t simply props. Together, they begin to describe an imaginary person.
We never need to meet them.
The objects have already told us something about their life.
This is where art direction becomes more than making something beautiful.
Objects are vocabulary.
A book can suggest intellect, solitude, permanence or taste.
Flowers can suggest sensuality, seasonality and mortality.
Wired headphones can suggest nostalgia, creative life and a certain indifference to technological newness.
Handwriting suggests an individual rather than an institution.
Ceramics, textiles, wood and paper carry evidence of touch.
Old technology creates temporal ambiguity. Suddenly we aren’t quite sure whether the image belongs to today or fifteen years ago.
None of these things necessarily cost very much.
But choosing the right ones requires taste.
You don’t need a couture budget to create culture
The scale at which the major luxury houses can work is extraordinary.
They can commission artists for months, build enormous sets and collaborate with craftspeople at a level most brands simply cannot replicate.
But I don’t think the lesson for smaller brands is to imitate the scale.
It is to understand the intention.
You don’t need an enormous budget to communicate reverence for craft.
You could work with a ceramicist in your city to create objects for a campaign.
Ask an illustrator to draw something instead of reaching for stock imagery.
Commission a florist to create a sculptural piece rather than treating flowers as decoration.
Print something when it would be easier to render it.
Build a physical set.
Photograph something that has actually been touched.
Let materials retain their texture.
Look through your own archives.
Put a book into the frame because the book means something to the world of the brand, not because books happen to be trending on a moodboard.
The question isn’t:
Does this look expensive?
The more interesting question is:
What does this make someone feel?
From collaboration to patronage
There is another idea here that I think luxury brands should take seriously.
Patronage.
At their best, brands don’t simply borrow from culture.
They help create it.
There is a meaningful difference between using the aesthetic of ceramics and commissioning a ceramicist.
Between applying a hand-drawn font and hiring an illustrator.
Between reproducing the appearance of an old photograph and giving a photographer room to experiment with the medium.
Between referencing craftsmanship and actually supporting a craftsperson.
For a founder, this doesn’t necessarily require millions.
Commissioning one emerging artist instead of purchasing generic artwork is patronage.
Working with a local maker to create ten objects for a shoot is patronage.
Asking a photographer to interpret an idea rather than reproduce a Pinterest reference is patronage.
Giving a poet space to write something that wasn’t optimised for conversion is patronage.
These decisions create something much more valuable than an aesthetic.
They create a cultural world around a brand.
Don’t manufacture nostalgia. Build culture.
Of course, there is a danger in all of this.
Once a visual language becomes recognisable, it becomes easy to reproduce.
Add a paperback.
Add wired headphones.
Use flash photography.
Introduce some grain.
Choose handwritten typography.
Place flowers slightly imperfectly.
Suddenly the brand looks human.
Except it doesn’t.
Because the goal isn’t to sprinkle analogue objects over a campaign until it feels authentic.
The question is what your brand genuinely reveres.
Maybe it’s literature.
Maybe it’s architecture.
Maybe it’s gardening, dance, ceramics, jazz, carpentry, food, cinema, tailoring or a particular landscape.
Find the things that belong naturally inside the world of the brand.
Then work with the people who dedicate their lives to them.
That is how visual language becomes culture rather than styling.
In praise of things that take time
We are entering an era in which making something perfect is becoming extraordinarily easy.
Making something meaningful isn’t.
Perhaps that’s why I keep finding books, flowers, tangled wires, brushstrokes and handmade objects in my reference folders.
They are small reminders that someone was here.
Someone chose this book.
Someone grew this flower.
Someone shaped this clay.
Someone drew this line.
Someone moved that object frame by frame.
For brands, the opportunity isn’t simply to become more nostalgic.
It is to become more human.
Work with artists. Commission craftspeople. Leave room for texture, accident and interpretation. Build a world around the things you genuinely value.
Technology can give us infinite images.
Taste is knowing which ones are worth making.
Best, Paula Founder of H&F
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