Aether Apparel

For the better part of a decade I collaborated with Aether Apparel to produce imagery for their billboards, retail stores, lookbooks, and website. Locations were a shared conversation: I would propose options, and the team would make final calls based on budget. Together we shot in Japan, Norway, Iceland three times, Joshua Tree, Germany and Austria, Alaska twice, Southern Utah, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.

I would arrive a week ahead of the crew to scout locations and build a shoot day itinerary structured around the best available natural light. In winter Alaska or summer Iceland that planning is not optional. The days are long in either direction and a bulletproof schedule is the difference between getting the shots and losing them to a wrong place, at the wrong time.

Casting was an ongoing part of the collaboration. Aether's customer is a specific kind of person, someone you could genuinely believe could live in the glass mansion on a hill and take out their carbon fiber sloop for the afternoon. Finding people who read that way without looking like they were performing it was always an interesting challenge.

The shoots were guerrilla by nature. We would move fast through a city or landscape, cycling through outfits on the fly and chasing slivers of light as they appeared. There was always an architectural element in the mix, a deliberate tension between built structure, natural landscape, and the clean modern silhouettes the clothes created in any environment.