Gant Rugger Spring 2013 Campaign: Team Americano

Iconic eighties brand Gant Rugger unveiled their latest marketing campaign titled “Team Americano” turning traditional blogger outreach on its head. The fashion line, which was re-launched in 2010 under the creative direction of Christopher Bastin, features a handful of New York fashion bloggers as their actual models.

Shot in Florence while attending the Pitti Immagine Uomo men’s wear trade show, the campaign exists not only through the lens of Gant Rugger photographer Derrick Leung, but through the bloggers’ photography and posts on their own social media sites. The 6 amateur models include: Gabe Alonso (Senior Editor at Gilt Man), Justin Chung (fashion photographer), Zeph Colombatto (fashion writer), Noah Emrich (photographer), Sean Hotchkiss (photographer), and Lawrence Schlossman (Editor-in-Chief at Four-Pins.com). A quick click through their blogs will make even the sharpest urbanite feel sartorially challenged. Not surprisingly, all six were given free rein to style pieces from the Spring 2013 line themselves, affording the campaign a sense of un-studied studiedness.

Retail brand J. Crew executed a similar campaign last year called “Hello, World!” They hired blogger/photographer Scott Schumann (the Sartorialist) and blogger/illustrator Garance Doré to document 9 global stylemakers integrating J. Crew pieces into their wardrobe, allowing each to showcase their own personal sense of style. The images and videos were cross-pollinated over all three sites extending the mass brand’s reach into more independent fashion circles.

In both cases, the bloggers openly acknowledged being paid for their work, and in the marketing world, ROI would be the hard-and-fast rule to measure success. In the fashion world however, where brand reputations are born overnight but are also just as fleeting, building credibility through more indie sources can have a slow burn effect that is difficult to quantify. Mainstream brands like J. Crew (with style icon Jenna Lyons at the helm) and Gant Rugger (under the guidance of Christopher Bastin) have just enough cool factor to be plausibly leveraging this type of campaign. This semblance of authenticity is exactly what both brands are banking on, building on the street cred and social reach of these bloggers to create micro-campaigns beyond the mass campaign. Successfully navigating the fine line between blogger authenticity and paid advertising is a key to their success, and in many ways explains how both these brands are given license to blur those boundaries.

peter g