Not in the mood
If everyone's referencing the same things, are they actually referencing anything?
A recent article in Esquire got at something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The piece, “Why Fashion Brands Started Flashing Us Their Mood Boards,” is about the somewhat nascent trend of fashion (or “lifestyle”) companies maintaining public-facing “mood boards.”
Traditionally, the mood board is an internal – sometimes even personal – tool used during creative production. A director, fashion designer, architect, interior designer, or creative director might compile a mood board to help shape the direction, flavor, or ideal outcome of a new creative product. The mood board acts as a guide for him/herself, and/or his/her team. A mood board could be made up of anything – film stills, old advertising photography, a book cover, a piece of music, fabric swatches, a certain wood grain, a gesture, literally anything.
The mood board hopefully evokes or signals the desired “mood” of the endeavor, which the designer can then evoke or signal again, loosely, in some way, in the newly-produced work. The designer’s brilliant vision-to-be, distilled into a handful of images so exciting and so idiosyncratic no one else could ever even think to combine them, let alone produce coherent work based on them. This is the romantic ideal of the mood board.
More prosaically, often a mood board is part of the pitch process. It’s a tool you can use to sell your idea to whoever you need to sell it to to actually get it made (client, boss, etc). It’s just references, used to show how something could turn out. Usually, it’s some Keynote slides or a shared Dropbox folder.
The popularity of the mood board as a public-facing channel of brand communication is, in a way, strange then. Why would anyone want to see this part of the process? Or, maybe more to the point, why would a creative and unique brand or designer want to reveal it? But in light of our largely visual culture and the demands placed on individuals and companies alike to more or less constantly put out content, it starts to become clear. As a Wieden & Kennedy art director puts it in the Esquire piece:
“And, as attention is the new economy, it’s not really surprising that brands have reacted to people spending hours scrolling through visual stim[ulation] blogs/instas [sic] by creating more spaces that allow them to further deepen the connection they have with their followers.”
Besides, the images posted by brands to their public mood boards serve more as advertising – a way to align the brand with an aspirational mood – rather than true references to be worked into the actual creative products the brands make. “Public mood boards allow brands to associate themselves with any imagery, without having to pay for it,” says the art director.
That’s all good – why not try to develop a recognizable brand aesthetic and, at the same time, cultivate an emotional connection with your followers/customers in an affordable way? What’s weird, though, is that the main proponents of the mood board-as-content all basically have the exact same things on their mood boards.
Let’s see. Clothing and lifestyle brands Sporty & Rich, Aimé Leon Dore, Rowing Blazers, and JJJJound all maintain public mood boards. Posted to dedicated Instagram accounts and/or on “Mood” pages on their websites, these mood boards are essentially prolific streams of curated photos. The imagery that across each of the mood boards is, however, strikingly consistent.
A quick scroll through these four reveals very uniform motifs: 1980s aerobics or fashion ads; 1980s shelter magazine spreads; vintage magazine covers; vintage furniture; vintage cars; vintage car interiors; vintage technology (cameras, speakers, recording equipment); vintage photos of serious creative figures (Steve Jobs, Steve McQueen, Warhol, Basquiat, Picasso) at work or at leisure; women’s abs, or butts; naked women with tan lines; women in bathing suits; cocktails; plants; natural light; fresh food; Princess Diana; Patagonias; Range Rovers; Mercedes; Nikes; Jordans; New Balances; Rolexes; dry or risqué cartoons; European seaside towns; cluttered, or sparse, interiors; basketball; Provençal estates.
These images are mostly beautiful and, in small doses, do represent a unique and honed vision. (It’s worth noting, too, that despite the overwhelming similarities in the aesthetic content, the specific images themselves never actually repeat anywhere; one wonders where all of these specific yet different found images come from? Is everyone scanning pages from hoarded vintage magazines and trying different Google search terms until they disinter the perfect shot of a vintage Lamborghini parked on a dirt road?). And they do effectively evoke a “mood,” which is one of generally casual opulence, good living, hard work, twentieth century creativity, healthy hedonism, worn-in luxury, exotic world-weariness, knowledge of classical beauty with a downtown edge. An image is worth a thousand words, but these endlessly scrolling pages really need only three: worldly good taste.
Evocative, yes. Except as it stands, the images that make up these four mood boards are more or less interchangeable, yet they come from completely different brands – presumably with different messages, aesthetics, and ideals to push? But never mind, the images seem to say, that doesn’t matter, as long as the taste remains good enough.
And, so far, the taste does seem to be good enough. Emily Oberg started Sporty & Rich as an Instagram account first, in 2014, which she then turned into a printed magazine, also full of more or less only found images. Later she started making and clothes – sweats with the Sporty & Rich logo mostly – and releasing them in small batches, styling the shoots herself. “People know Sporty & Rich first for the mood board, and now for the clothes,” she says in Esquire. This is exactly true: so what is Sporty & Rich? It’s an Instagram account that sells merch. The product, you could say, is the collection of images Oberg has compiled – or more specifically, the feeling they evoke. The product is the idea of her good taste; wearing the clothes signal that you appreciate it.
But where did this kind of “good taste” come from? Pretty much from JJJJound, which was founded as an image-only Blogspot in 2006 by Justin Saunders. Saunders started JJJJound as “a digital mood board intended to examine the recurring patterns in timeless design.” Impressive and truly innovative (this was right before Tumblr and years before Instagram), JJJJound is likely the original curator of the worldly/good taste/design-nerd aesthetic as we now know it today. Saunders is extremely prolific – there are “thousands” of “color-coordinated” images on JJJJound’s endless-scroll Mood page – and in recent years has parlayed the success of his image-blog into a design/consulting/clothing/lifestyle company. (Which mainly sells, again, minimally branded sweats, tees, canvas bags, Nalgene bottles, etc. in limited editions.)
Oberg and Saunders (who are also both Canadian), then, are more like influencers, not designers per se. Curators, not creators; their stock and trade is images, is taste, is mood. But Rowing Blazers and Aimé Leon Dore are both actual clothing companies founded by designers, producing entire collections of new shoes, pants, jackets, etc. Their public mood boards must function somewhat differently: maybe as mood boards in their more traditional sense – as the precursor to the creative output – or as extensions of their physical products, or as free-to-produce supplements to their own editorial content?
Rowing Blazers founder Jack Carlson says in Esquire: “Rowing Blazers is a very eclectic brand. I think if someone just hears the name and isn’t familiar with the brand, they might get a very narrow idea of what it’s all about.” The public mood board is a pretty low stakes way use to freely add meaning to your brand’s image and connect with your audience more often. But if the mood board becomes neglected or derivative, those stakes increase. It can turn into a risk.
And it’s not only the above streetwear-adjacent brands leveraging the public mood board: high-end fashion brands also actively maintain them. The Row has chosen to use its Instagram account to display only art and objet d’art. The signal is clear and complete, a closed loop: if you know these works, you have good taste; if you have good taste, you wear our clothes; if you wear our clothes, you have good taste; if you have good taste, you know these works. The Row’s page is probably the best-executed, most unique, and most extreme example of the mood board-as-branding: there is not a single photo of their clothing posted and yet you intuit something very specific about the brand’s identity.
Yet even this extreme position is not unique: the Rachel Comey Instagram is also predominantly made up of images of artwork. Although to Rachel Comey’s credit, the work chosen feels “truer” to Rachel Comey’s brand – more folksy and less austere than the Row’s selections – and there are a few editorial images of the for-sale clothes scattered throughout the page.
Obviously there are gradations and shades of signal and taste in each company’s mood board content that one can become more or less attuned to if one cares (and many people do care: these brands have a couple million followers between them – Sporty & Rich has 160,000 Instagram followers, for example, and the Row alone has 1.3 million). But the overall feeling is that these mood boards reflect (perhaps already clichéd) visual trends more than they really reflect the specific “creative vision” of any individual brand, founder, or designer. They’re also symptomatic of the anxiety that almost every company (and person) feels now to post constantly, to always, daily, hourly, provide its audience with content. But how many times can the same thing be posted? After a while, the images cease to evoke a mood, and instead act as shorthand for an already-established one; then it’s just a short time until the whole operation becomes a rote obligation.
You could argue that this handful of brands is only representative of a specific niche of the fashion world, of the New York fashion world, and that they likely appeal to and seek out the same customers. Sure, but then shouldn’t that give them each even more incentive to diversify their visual output, not less?
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