An article exploring Ignasi Monreal's digital paintings which formed the basis of a major advertising campaign by Gucci in 2018. His work was placed in the broader context of fashion illustration and its relationship with photography and asked why so little fashion illustration has explored the potential of narrative in the way that other areas of fashion marketing have, such as photography, shows and films. The article discusses Monreal's narrative based work and his approach to appropriation

Taylor, Zoe

English

University of Northampton's Research Explorer

Daydream Nation:Rome-based illustrator Ignasi Monreal's digital paintings mix art-historical and pop-cultural references to sublime effect. Zoe Taylor explores his work for Gucci's 'Utopian Fantasy' campaign, examining how fashion illustration is breaking from its past.

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6766Daydream NationGift Giving, Gucci, 2017Rome-based illustrator Ignasi Monreal’s digital paintings mix art-historical and  pop-cultural references to sublime effect. Zoë Taylor explores his work for Gucci’s ‘Utopian Fantasy’ campaign, examining how fashion illustration is breaking from its past.“It’s the first painted campaign that I know of, and a big  leap of faith from Gucci,” says the artist behind the thirty-two digital paintings used by the luxury Italian brand to advertise  its Spring/Summer 2018 collection. From glossy double spreads in magazines – many of which reveal augmented reality effects when scanned with the Gucci app – to billboards, animated window displays, interactive sticker art, giant murals and 360-degree panoramas accessible via in-store VR devices,  every image in the campaign was made by Monreal. It featured no photography. While fashion brands have increasingly capitalised on illustration’s popularity online, Gucci’s ‘Utopian Fantasy’ (#GucciHallucination) has made the most extensive use of it. “Gucci is about making fashion extremely cool,” says the  tech blogger Dimitri Makris, who  also notes that the brand enjoyed  a 44.5% increase in revenues  in the months following  the campaign’s launch, dispelling long-held myths  that illustration can’t be effective in fashion advertising. 6968Utopian Fantasy, Gucci, 20187071At first glance, you might assume that the images had been painted traditionally, but they’re all digitally made. Using  a Wacom tablet and Photoshop, Monreal effectively captures  the feel of European painting from the Renaissance to the  19th century. Although he references iconic paintings such as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851-52), others are harder to pin down – maybe the flooring of a Dutch vanitas here, or a baroque sky there. “This was like my love letter to painting, and I enjoyed merging the realism with all of these different references  from art history,” he told Vogue.From conception to the finishing touches, each painting  took about two days to complete and Monreal worked in  intense fourteen-hour stretches to achieve the level of detail  he wanted. Over several months, he produced nearly 200 paintings for Gucci to select from. “It’s digital painting, so it’s  all in my computer or tablet… Since I’ve been doing this since I was 14, I’ve really had time to refine and create my own specific technique,” he told W magazine. Although he has had traditional artistic training, as a teenager Monreal developed a preference for the digital – which he discovered through video games – “because you don’t have to have any materials and it’s cleaner”.Monreal’s series mashes up imagery from Old Master paintings with pop-cultural, alchemical and post-internet references to create striking, slightly ironic scenes – from mermaids on iPhones and cherubs plucking Post-It notes to fashionista Fates, casually sitting on top of a Google Maps Earth. This “internet-friendly weirdness” – as Dazed Digital’s Dominic Cardogan puts it – is clearly directed at an Instagram audience. But the series also conveys a romanticism that transcends the wry humour. In its press release, Gucci describes Monreal’s “haunting characters” who inhabit a “mythical universe”: from sunsets to thunderstorms, sublime skies pervade the series. Meanwhile, the references to classical painting offer a colour palette and an approach to lighting and composition that  give these whimsical images drama and impact.The paintings are designed to grab your attention, but also  to be read. It takes time to discover their details. Take, for example, the campaign’s lead image which merges elements from all three panels of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500) with those from Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) – echoed in the pose of the central couple – alongside double-headed swans, arrows, disembodied hands and Disney-esque bluebirds. There’s even a tiny portrait of Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, sitting pensively  by a stream in a pink suit, with a halo and a Jesus beard. Of course, these images are striking partly because of the extraordinary garments they represent – the cape adorned  with a golden feathers motif and the fully embroidered 14th century-style dress that take centre stage here. But equally important is the skill with which they’ve been rendered: the shadows that delineate the crisp pleats of a skirt, the regularity of the classic double-G print on a transparent dress and the glistening of sequined Snow Whites, bejewelled shell suits  and patent leather handbags. Despite the evocations of old paintings, the heightened detail and accuracy have led many  to describe the series as photorealist, or even hyper-real.The appearance and gestures of the characters in these paintings resemble those in a fashion shoot. “I used a lot  of reference photos because it’s a campaign with an agenda  and the product needs to be visible, and the images can’t be misleading – they have to be faithful to what’s being sold,”  says Monreal. He photographed the models himself in a low-key shoot “with no make-up or hair”, which he added later as he built up the images. Utopian Fantasy, Gucci, 20187372Utopian Fantasy, Gucci, 201875The Spanish-born 27-year-old studied comics and illustration  in Barcelona and then fashion creative direction in Madrid,  before moving to London to work as an art director for brands  like Swarovski. By night he worked on his illustrations, which  soon took off with commissions for W magazine and various musicians, including FKA Twigs.Gucci first approached Monreal in 2015 for #GucciGram,  a series of fifteen illustrations by fifteen artists published  on Instagram, which launched just after the arrival of creative director Alessandro Michele. Monreal’s contribution of eerily blinking weather girls and TV psychics soon led to animated commissions for Dior, JW Anderson and Louis Vuitton as well  as further collaborations with Gucci. These included T-shirt designs, murals and the centrepiece of the 2017 Gift Giving campaign: an illustrated book that references the fall of  Icarus and contemporary takes on Renaissance-style still  lives to showcase Gucci accessories.Monreal’s playfulness and interest in myth make him  an ideal partner for Michele’s vision. His imagery echoes  and complements the overload of references that epitomise Michele’s work, which, in this collection, ranged from Elton John’s glam rock wardrobe to Queen Elizabeth I, Disney and Marlboro packaging.In the past few years, Gucci has teamed up with more illustrators than any other luxury brand, working with Jayde  Fish, Angelica Hicks, Nour Flayhan and Unskilled Worker, among many others. Michele has said he wants to transform Gucci from a brand into an immersive experience, and his collaborations with artists and innovative use of social media have played a major role in this. “Today, creativity is often born and finds its voice in digital media, a vital source of visual culture,” he  once said. Illustration suits Gucci’s new association with free imagination, fantasy and eccentricity, and although it gets  great engagement on Instagram – where the fashion house  has more than 32 million followers, and where Michele discovers his illustrators – the work of these artists is used not only for online advertising but also as giant murals on store facades,  on clothing and in Gucci-curated art exhibitions. Towards the end of 2017 Vogue cited Gucci’s use of illustration and its emergence “as a tool for cutting through the visual  noise of social media” as evidence that fashion illustration  was “having ‘a moment’”. But proclamations that ‘It’s back!’  have become something of a trope in fashion, where illustration Gift Giving, Gucci, 20177776seems to be continuously dying and being reborn, often simultaneously. Even its so-called ‘golden age’, during  the first 60 years of the 20th century, was also its extended  swan song, according to historian Colin McDowell.Fashion illustration continues to evolve and diversify as  culture and technology change, yet somehow the perception remains that it’s a fleeting, diminishing form, forever overshadowed by its former glory as the dominant medium  in style magazines. Perceptions of fashion illustration tend  to remain fixed on that which echoes its history. Vogue even wonders if it might be making a return because of a current craze for nostalgia. It seems hard for fashion illustration to  shake off the view that it is fundamentally of the past. Monreal wants to challenge this. “I want to try to help put illustration on the same level as photography and video,” he  has said. Speaking to Plastik magazine, he attributes his success to “working hard and having a painting style that is different from what we are used to in fashion illustration.”Monreal enjoys creating characters, which he puts down  to his love of comics. His work, which is dense, detailed and narrative-based, contrasts with fashion illustration’s conventions of gestural line work, watery shapes and playfully exaggerated or semi-abstracted bodies on stark backgrounds.Since the perfection of colour photography in the late 1930s, fashion illustration has largely sought to stake out its place by doing ‘what photography can’t’. Writer Holly Brubach explains that fashion illustration and photography were “twin forms that grew up together over course of 20th century”, and each came “to specialise in what the other was incapable of doing as  well”. Over the years, much of it became less detailed, more abstracted: and it has explored gestural or exaggerated methods of representing the fashioned body in a myriad  of playful ways. Although there might be suggestions of character, the mise-en-scène required to tell a story has  largely disappeared. The telling of stories in fashion has developed an acknowledged sophistication in photography, film and  theatrical fashion shows. But in striving to do what  photography can’t, fashion illustration has perhaps been  slower to match what fashion photography does at its  most interesting – setting up scenes loaded with tension  or mystery, which enables the images to go beyond  representing products and explore other themes or issues.Gift Giving, Gucci, 20177978Utopian Fantasy, Gucci, 201880The images in Monreal’s ‘Utopian Fantasy’ series likewise set up dramatic scenes, which suggest stories and invite questions. Perhaps it’s the allusions to history and myth that make them seem so loaded and mysterious. The way they situate fashion  in a web of conflated references encourages interpretation, although their exact meaning is far from clear. Does this  hi-tech recreation of old paintings bring into focus the new significance of digital media, or ask what it means to be contemporary now? What do we make of the juxtapositions  of historic symbols of status and beauty with those of today?  Or the mash-ups of fashion-shoot poses with icons from Western cultural mythology, from Ophelia to Snow White?Fashion illustration is capable of such complexity. It needn’t be restrained by preconceptions of what it should be and  now, more than ever, the possibilities for it seem unbound  by technology. The boundary between the ‘made’ and photographic image hasn’t always been clear, even in fashion – but the rise of digital media has blurred the lines even further. Photographs can be seamlessly altered, blended and mixed together to fantastic effect (see for example photographer  Nick Knight’s pioneering fashion images of the 1990s); likewise, the illusion of photographic realness can be created through digital rendering. While there is much still to explore within traditional media, this has opened a whole new terrain for fashion illustration. So, what can fashion illustration contribute today, alongside photography? In the words of Dolly Jones, former online editor for Vogue, it “allows for a different daydream”. Monreal’s work does just that.Gift Giving, Gucci, 20178382Utopian Fantasy, Gucci, 2018