Edita Vilkeviciute by Annemarieke van Drimmelen for Zara Home Summer Bliss 2021
/
Top model Edita Vilkeviciute poses in at ease summer essentials for Zara Home’s Summer Bliss 2021 trend guide. Edita poses at her new “good energy” home in Ibiza, lensed by Annemarieke van Drimmelen [IG].
Zara Home is a freestanding website combining fashion essentials with the Spanish brand’s homewear pieces that include pillows, decorative bowls, terracotta plates and the perfect morning coffee mug.
The new photo shoot is an extension of the first installment of Summer Bliss with its focus on swimwear. Edita wrote about the house on Zara Home’s Insta: “"We were looking for a house in Ibiza for a while and we didn’t know what exactly we were looking for. But the minute we entered through the gate of this paradise we had goosebumps all over the body. Without even seeing the house I knew this was the place! It has a very good energy."
The Zara Home website is an excellent example of where online sales are going in a post-pandemic world — shouild we be lucky enough to living in a post-COVID world. Increasingly scientists say “probably not”. The challenge is to manage COVID, not eradicate it.
Of course, there are the typical “buy” pages, where product lines up in perfect ofder. But the Zara Home Stories pages are among the softest-sell pages I’ve seen — and especially for such a large retailer as Zara. If you study the first-launched Summer Bliss story and then Writing from Hydra, you will note a personal expansion of the written-word storytelling experience.
To be fair, Summer Bliss has images of Edita’s House in Ibiza w/notes on the ‘Polaroid’, but AOC still feels an evolution into ‘Writing from Hydra’, where the film takes us to a place — Hydra — without a model but with a great sense of place. The narrative uses ‘we’ which implies the home of the person telling the story — her or his or their house — but also our house because we project ourselves into the setting. The words encourage us to ‘live’ there and buy into the narrative. This is very sophisticated, and totally literal, step by step selling online. AOC is impressed.
The valley where we live is bathed in the golden sunlight of the morning.
Traveling across the village, the light hits the window frame and spreads across the bed.
Equally noteworthy when we click on a “See items” on the image — which is so discrete that it’s nondisruptive to the imagined experience of being in Hydra — that the product page of linens and pillows is relevangt only to that image. We do not see the entire Zara Home linen assortment. We live only in the world of the ‘Writing from Hydra’ story. All the insanity of shopping online where items fall over each other to compete for our attention is gone. Nothing is jumping out demanding our attention. We are left in a Zen place — except that we see (May 4, 2021) a ‘Join Life’ small badge on the ‘Striped Linen Throw Pillow’ so we know the pillow is part of Zara’s ‘conscious’, driving to sustainability collection.
A LOT of thinking is going into this Zara Home presentation, and the focus on the client — the ‘friend’ who dropped in to gaze — is very low-tech. Call me impressed. ~ Anne
