How To Build Your Fashion Brand With Photography
Fashion photography has a huge influence on your brand and is one of the most important aspects of marketing your clothing business. Photography can show a brand’s identity as well as providing a visual of the garment’s style. Every image of your garments should be considered as a reflection of your brand. Whether you need content for your ecommerce website, advertising campaigns, or social media channels, the way your clothing is styled, photographed, and edited in post-production impacts how customers view your brand.
In this guide, we explore various production styles you could opt for. Each style contributes to branding in a different way, making your choices important to get right.
What's Your Brand Story And Values?
Before considering various fashion photography styles, it’s crucial to understand your brand story and values. Every fashion brand, whether luxury, streetwear, outdoor or sports, stands for something unique. For example, your brand may be about minimalism, retro styles, sustainability, or cutting-edge trends. Emphasise what makes you different to help your brand stand out.
Aligning your images with your values ensures consistency across your brand. It’s your way of communicating with your customers, matching their style, and helping them see that your products are for them. This foundation informs decisions about lighting, styling, locations, animations, and effects added in post-production.
Fashion Model Photography
Using real models is one of the most effective ways to bring garments and brand identity to life. Models add movement, emotion, and storytelling, helping customers connect on a personal level. Whether the look is edgy, elegant, or playful, model photography reflects how the garments align with a customer’s lifestyle.
Choice of model is hugely important, and there’s lots to take into account. First of all, you’ll have to decide on the ‘look’ you want to achieve as this will govern your decision making. As a general rule, it's best to reflect your core customer groups in your choice of models.
When selecting models, you must also consider their abilities. For example, many fashion models will be more familiar with stills than video. Plan how you would want them to pose, move, and act. Then consider models that have your requirements within their skill set. An experienced studio or model agency will help you make your selections.
Ghost Mannequin And Flat Lay Styles
Ghost mannequin photography is a staple in ecommerce fashion. By photographing garments on a mannequin, and then retouching out the mannequin digitally, the clothing appears three-dimensional while maintaining the shape and fit. The style presents garments clearly and professionally.
Alternatively, flat lay photography could be used. Flat lays are perfect for capturing casual fashion looks, accessories, and outfit pairings. By arranging clothing and props strategically on a flat surface, brands can highlight detail, textures, and outfit styling ideas. Flat lays work especially well for creative content, adding personality and relatability to the images.
Both photography techniques can be used creatively to contribute to brand building. Creativity can be added in the way the garments are shot or styled.
Creative Image Retouching
Fashion brands should consider how post-production can be used to create their images. Simple retouching on the garments and models is perfect for ecommerce, however branded images used in advertising or across social media benefit from added creativity.
Retouching spans a wide range of techniques, allowing you to incorporate creative concepts into your images. Backgrounds can be added that are both realistic or imaginative, and artistic effects can bring your image to life.
Lighting Styles In Fashion Photography
Lighting is an effective way to show your brand's style and personality in fashion photography, particularly in combination with models. Developing a lighting style is a subtle way to build a certain look for your brand.
Hard Lighting
Hard lighting with strong shadows can create a bold, and dramatic look. This can be effective for standing out against competitors, particularly for new brands. The style has to be used carefully, as the lighting can become more stylistic rather than show the details of the garment. Therefore, an artistic use of light lends itself to brand building as opposed to ecommerce.
Soft Lighting
Soft lighting is most commonly used for ecommerce images as it shows garments in detail, with a clean and professional look. This style also helps maintain consistency across a range of clothing, and between images of the same garment. For example, soft lighting tends to display less variation in colours which is helpful when using a combination of ghost mannequin, flat lay, and model photography.
Video Styles For Fashion Brands
Video is a great marketing tool to introduce into the mix. It can communicate far more brand personality than just stills alone. It allows brands to be creative with use of models, locations, or simply the garments and accessories themselves.
Stop Motion Animation For Fashion
Stop motion animation is popular in digital marketing campaigns for clothing brands. The style is naturally playful and is a good fit for social media. Stop motion animations are created from a large number of stills with incremental movements of the product. The stills are then edited into a sequence frame by frame to create movement.
Brands can highlight product features in an engaging format with stop motion. Features such as pockets, zips, hoods, can all be shown in one short clip. The style is suited to garments that are practical as well as stylish such as outdoor clothing, workwear, and sportswear.
Stop motion can also be used with props, bright colours and changing backgrounds to add extra visuals to your brand. This is perfect for symbolising where and when a garment would be worn, linking the brand with recognisable themes. For example, summer collections could be shown with holiday essentials and vibrant colours.
Model Demonstration Videos
An alternative to stop motion is to use a model to demonstrate garment features. This is an effective style to show multiple product features in a short video clip. With a soft lighting set up and simple movements, the style is perfect for ecommerce. Depending on the type of garment, the videos can be comprised of multiple clips edited together, or one simple shot.
Room Set Photography
Room set photography can be used by fashion brands to create context by placing garments within styled environments. A wide range of environments can be built within a studio, and brands should create settings that are familiar to their customers. Often, an aspirational feel works well as a hook for your customers. Consistency in room set photography will start to associate your brand with certain environments and themes.
Carefully styled sets add warmth and relatability without detracting from the clothing. The styling of rooms can have a major influence on branding. Props and décor should amplify your brand and be relatable to your customers.
Location Photography
On-location photography captures garments in real-world spaces, like city streets, beaches, or the countryside. Choosing the right backdrop reinforces your brand’s narrative. It’s effective for model photography, where an engaging location can provide an identity for a brand.
For example, a luxury suit shot against a high-rise skyline conveys sophistication, while a flowing dress against a natural landscape evokes freedom and elegance. Location photography allows you to explore your brand and express its values.
Compositing For Clothing
Compositing is a post-production method where multiple images are combined into a final creative piece. This might include swapping backgrounds, merging exposures, or adding graphics. In fashion photography, compositing allows brands to create innovative visuals that stand out online and in print.
It can be used with a range of styles and can be an effective solution to costly location shoots.
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We cover model photography, location shoots, room set builds, ghost mannequin, flat lays, and creative post-production.
