Photo & Video · 2025

Need.jpg

FotografiaVideoModa

The project

Brief

Need.jpg has been making handmade streetwear for five years. The graphic is not printed: it is cut out of a fabric and sewn onto the garment, and every run starts from a different cloth that, once used up, does not come back. The label made its name at industry events from Milan to Naples and is now stocked in Berlin and on Lake Garda. It is a way of working that justifies the price, but only if you can see it. They asked us for two things in a single production: clean images for the shop product pages, and a campaign for social and for the collection launch.

The challenges

The value of the piece is in the sewn fabric, which disappears in a flat photograph
One production for two very different uses, product page and campaign
A derelict building, with only the light coming through the windows
The reel had to be ready for the collection announcement

The solution

Rather than looking for a compromise we shot two different registers on the same day. In the studio, a coloured seamless backdrop and broad soft light: the product page has to show the stitching and the weave, which are the reason that piece does not cost what a printed tee costs. Outside, an abandoned building with its orange structures used as a frame, the models caught in movement and in the still moments. The same day produced the vertical for the collection reel, cut to hold the first second.

What we made

The pieces of the project

The lookbook for the shop

A Need piece costs what it costs because of the fabric: the graphic is cut out of a printed cloth and sewn on, one piece at a time. If the product page does not show that material, all the customer is left with is the price. Hence the two decisions on set: a blue backdrop instead of the usual white, so the burgundy separates without hard edges, and broad frontal light rather than raking light, because on the appliqués what matters is reading the fabric, not the shadow falling across it.

The campaign in a derelict building

Need does not sell a t-shirt, it sells the fact that whoever wears it will not run into another one like it. A campaign on a neutral background would have said the opposite. We chose an abandoned building and kept what was already there: peeling walls, rubble, graffiti. It works as a set without costing an hour of post production and, more to the point, it does not fight the clothes, which stay the brightest thing in the frame.

The things you would normally move

The orange fire stairs answer the yellow and red of the appliqués. Instead of working around the uprights we kept them in front of the subject, and the same goes for the sheet of broken glass: what you would normally move out of the way became the foreground. It does two things. It gives depth to scenes that would otherwise be a pose against a wall, and it makes the eye look for the garment instead of being handed it.

The reel for the collection release

Need's calendar is made of drops, and a drop lives in the days it is announced. For the spring summer release we shot vertical, with the clothes worn in ordinary situations, sitting in the sun reading the paper or hanging off a gate, closing on the announcement sign. A short cut with the pace up from the first frame: in that format it is the first second that decides whether anyone watches the rest.

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The collaboration: the Eddidesign hoodies

Out of the collaboration with the Need crew came two hoodies carrying our mark, made with their method: the shape cut out of a printed fabric and sewn onto the back, with a different cloth on each piece. One black, filled with a collage of manga pages, and one white with a painterly print. Two pieces, neither of them repeatable, which is exactly the point of what they do. We took them out and about instead of shooting them on a mannequin.

Visit Need.jpg

The collaboration: the Eddidesign hoodies

Capo Need.jpg inquadrato attraverso la ringhiera del ballatoio

Behind the walkway railing

The process

Studio lookbook

2025

Seamless backdrop shots for the shop product pages.

Location campaign

2025

A day of shooting in a derelict building, with the clothes worn.

Launch reel

2025

Vertical video for the collection release.

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