When an infographic becomes a global phenomenon
Client
Zalando
Country
United Kingdom
Disciplines
Editorial Design
Infographics
Sector
Fashion
Retail
Big Group is a London-based marketing agency with more than 25 years’ experience connecting brands with markets and customers through integrated campaigns, digital experiences and performance marketing. BakerWilcox worked directly with Big Group on the project, which was conceived as a showcase of the agency’s creative and digital capabilities.
The brief
Big Group asked BakerWilcox to create an infographic exploring the fashion history of the Academy Awards in the run-up to the 2014 ceremony. The commission involved researching and illustrating every dress worn by a Best Actress winner who attended to accept her award, covering the history of the Oscars from its first ceremony in 1929 through to 2014.
As you get ready for this year’s ceremony, take a look back at what every Best Actress winner since 1929 has sported on the Red Carpet, from traditional black dresses to glittering, over-the-top frocks.
TIME
The execution
The project ultimately brought together 70 individually illustrated dresses, spanning more than eight decades of Hollywood fashion. Each gown was recreated in a distinctive freehand style inspired by a fashion designer’s sketchbook, combining smooth vector drawing with individually applied colour, shading and detail.
Research became a major part of the creative process. We worked from historic photography, written accounts and archive references to establish everything from silhouettes and fabrics to colours and designers. For some of the earliest ceremonies, surviving photographs existed only in black and white, so written descriptions were used to reconstruct the original colours as accurately as possible.
The final layout deliberately echoed the elegance of classical Hollywood. Rather than overwhelming the viewer with statistics, the dresses themselves became the data, allowing changes in fashion to emerge visually as the eye travelled through the decades. The progression from the comparatively restrained early ceremonies to the couture-led spectacle of the modern red carpet could be understood almost instantly.
Released immediately before the Academy Awards, the infographic struck a remarkable cultural chord. It was picked up by major fashion, entertainment and news publications around the world, including TIME and Fast Company, and quickly spread through social media. TIME published the complete retrospective for its audience, while Fast Company selected it as an “Infographic of the Day.”
The scale of the response exceeded anything anticipated at the outset. The campaign generated 375 media placements, drove more than 150,000 visitors to Big Group’s website and was estimated at its peak to have achieved one billion global views. The project was subsequently selected as a Showcase Entry in Data Visualization at the 2015 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, and the artwork was reproduced in posters and design and fashion publications.
Its success also led to a substantially expanded interactive sequel featuring more than 150 Oscar dresses and allowing audiences to explore the collection by actress, decade, designer, colour and other criteria.
grace kelly and marlon brando 1955
The illustrated dress worn by grace kelly
This was one of those rare projects where the response became almost as extraordinary as the work itself. We began by painstakingly researching and illustrating decades of Oscar fashion, never imagining that the finished infographic would travel around the world and ultimately reach an estimated billion views. Seeing it appear across major international media and later recognised by the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards was an enormously proud moment for everyone involved.
RICHARD BAKER
