- VAAN
- Posts
- Borrowed languages
Every category has its own visual vocabulary. Motorsport looks like motorsport. Haircare looks like haircare. What's interesting right now is who's ignoring that.
Birkenstock let a ballet house rework its most orthopedic silhouette. A blanket brand started dressing its site like a luxury fashion house. A haircare line hired a fashion photographer instead of a beauty one, and cast its models off the street. Competition breeds innovation, and right now, differentiation means crossing into an industry that isn't yours.
This issue is about that decision, and what it takes to make it stick.
How to turn a blanket into a luxury lifestyle
Luxury fashion houses sell restraint. Space, editorial pacing, the sense that nothing needs to be said twice. For Lola, we borrowed that same discipline.
The layout is full-bleed and cinematic, large real-estate blocks built for photography and video with almost no graphic design intrusion, optimized for motion but flexible enough to hold stills.
Thin margins between images create a continuous wall of imagery instead of a boxy grid, and on desktop the gallery owns 80% of the screen, a nod to fashion's own two-column product grids.
The "life-changing softness" gets communicated through photography, not copy, a CX principle we lean on often: see first, then click. Even collection pages open with an image header instead of the text tags most sites default to, one more place for the product to just be looked at.
Our new site redesign is live. See the work → https://lolablankets.com/
More exciting work on the horizon.
The balancing act of brand and conversion
Marek Czyz on why the brand always wins.
Every site lives or dies at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely get along: brand and conversion. Most teams pick a side.
Marek Czyz, VAAN's designer, uses Brand Conversion Design as the lens for his work. Below, his take on invisible design, why photography is a conversion tool, and why the brand always comes first, even when the brief is built around performance.
Featuring his work for KHY, DUA, and Isima. Different projects, same discipline.
Haircare is having its fashion campaign moment.
Funner shoots hair like a runway shoots a collection.
They’re selling hair as a form of self-expression, and it shows up first in how the brand photographs itself. The debut campaign was shot by Jamie Hawkesworth, a fashion photographer, not a beauty one, with models cast off the street rather than hired traditionally.
Behind it is real pedigree. Jonah Kaner leads as CEO alongside his parents, Daniel Kaner (cofounder of Oribe) and Sonia Kashuk. But the identity is what's carrying it: M/M Paris, the studio behind Loewe and Balenciaga's creative work, built a system where every product in the 21-piece launch gets its own color-coded logo, turning a haircare shelf into something that reads more like a collectible set than a routine.
Crossover collaborations
Promoting the upcoming Netflix comedy The Hawk, SKIMS teams up with Will Ferrell to launch its latest menswear campaign. Where SKIMS usually anchors to real athletes, this one borrows the same playbook for a character who doesn't exist outside Netflix, blurring the line between real-world shapewear marketing and fictional pop-culture storytelling.
Two sides of French design, one project. At the center is the "Beware of the Crocodile" Alpine Lacoste A290 Rallye, an electric hot hatch covered in 290 crocodile motifs with a red interior and exposed carbon details. The capsule around it, polos, jackets, caps, brings Lacoste's court-side polish into motorsport's language. Unveiled in Paris with Pierre Niney and Pierre Gasly.
Opposite ends of the footwear spectrum, which is exactly why it works. Repetto reworked the Arizona, Scala and Opéra with ballet bows, Mary Jane straps and its signature checked lining, laying dance shoe delicacy directly onto Birkenstock's anatomical footbed. In a collab market full of logo swaps, this is something neither brand could've made alone
PUMA and Aston Martin Aramco F1 launched "Homecoming," a limited capsule bringing velvet to motorsport fanwear for the first time. Debuted at Silverstone, plush velvet meets British Racing Green across oversized tees, the Green Lux Basket sneaker, caps and more. Fronted by Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll. Available now on PUMA.com and shop.astonmartinf1.com.
Brands we're watching
Annual Leave, from former Le Labo executives Emilie Mascarell and Amy Tran, launches as a micro-batch fragrance brand with a single limited scent, Summer Vol. 1.
Human Made is NIGO's deliberate inversion of BAPE, loud to quiet, maximalist to archival, all under one thesis: "the future is in the past." Classic NIGO to give each brand its own mascot, monkeys for BAPE, a tiger at Kenzo, a duck here, a signature that carries through. The ducks fly across the site as you scroll.
Thanks for tuning in!
We’d love to hear from you → [email protected]