12 October 2010

Sometimes, product shots benefit from some styling

So my post yesterday about photo stylists gone wild was actually a wild sweep away from what I intended to write when I sat down. The point was to highlight a different vanity made by the same company, Ypsilon. Here's the vanity.



Believe it. That's the cameo vanity in pink. It's available too in black.


Here it is in cream.


That's real tufted leather upholstery on the drawer fronts and that cameo's a depiction of Elizabeth Windsor, the Queen of England,  in an earlier, gentler time.

That's an Italian product aimed squarely at the US market. Again, I understand being provocative and I understand someone creating a buzzworthy object in order to sell the rest of his wares. But if this is the buzzworthy object and the rest of the wares are all but invisible, who at the helm of this ship?

I'm confused. Is Queen Elizabeth really a popular motif with American consumers? Is tufted leather remotely practical on the front of a vanity?

Does any of this matter? After all, I've spent two days writing about Ypsilon. Am I just a marionette in their well-conceived ploy to take over the world?

Would you put a pink, leather vanity with a Queen Elizabeth motif in your bathroom? If you were a manufacturer and this were in your product mix, would this be the thing you turned the stylists loose on to better disguise it in your catalog? I could think about all of this for days. I promise not to but I could.

10 comments:

  1. Aimed at the U.S. market? Hmmmmm, someone needs to brush up on their history. -Brenda-

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  2. you know.. I love pink. LOVE IT. But that's just horrible. And really, does it matter who that silhouette is of? It looks so generic I don't think anyone can really tell.

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  3. ERII is the bomb, and my bathroom is already pink, so I'll take it in black.

    The "Baroque Chic" style, if you will, because there's no real other name for it and Baroque is after all the "dirty" of the styles, seems to be picking up speed. One local store, The Cross, does a huge amount of this cross-gloss, renni-oque, stuff. I've also found that when a Euro-Marketer/Exec says "American" market, they mean North & South America, completely. Maybe they just mean wealthy female Vancouverites who live in Coal Harbour or Yaletown, because this stuff is huge here. HUGE!

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  4. Brenda, Nim and Corey: The motif of this vanity intrigues me more than anything and I think it's interesting that the three comments so far today come from three Canadians. Are there still pangs of nostalgia for the British monarchy in Canada? I seriously doubt that most US folks would get the connection at all.

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  5. Well, I can't speak for all of Canada by any stretch of the imagination.. but I do live not far from Victoria which is reportedly "more English than England" so you never know..

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  6. I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, myself. Unless to tip it into a canal, of course. I've been wondering why the silhouette doesn't look much like the Queen to me - of course it's because there's no crown. And did she ever really have flippy hair like that?
    Almost related - you can see all the different silhouettes of HM The Queen as imortalized on postage stamps here http://postalheritage.org.uk/exhibitions/onlineexhibitions/elizabeth?slide=6

    She was a pretty young thing, once, (weren't we all) but I'm willing to bet she never had a pink tufted leather vanity!

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  7. Nim: I'm intrigued by monarchy.

    Sarah: I never remember a portrait of her with a flip either. Artistic license?

    Fifi: They're in your color too!

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  8. My gosh, they are gross! Of course, they'll look even worse when my five-year-old misses the basin again and dribbles toothpaste-spit down the front. But then it isn't aimed at my demographic.

    It's pink... has a queen... pretty obvious market.

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  9. Hey! I resent that remark! Hah hah! Actually, when I see things like that I think "Dubai."

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