Dry Season

Autumn tailoring shot in a field of cut hay: one chair, one model and forty minutes of low sun.

Maison Arvel

Client

Maison Arvel

Location

Crau plain, Provence

Lens

35 mm and 85 mm · f/4 · 1/1000

Lighting

Late sun, one 4×4 bounce, no strobes

The brief, the light, the result

Maison Arvel wanted its autumn tailoring to feel lived in, not pressed. We scouted three farms on the Crau plain and chose the one where the hay had just been cut, because the stubble reads as texture at a distance and as colour up close.

The whole day was built around forty minutes. We blocked every look in the flat afternoon light, marked the chair positions with tent pegs, and shot nothing we intended to keep until the sun dropped below the poplars. One 4×4 bounce did the work a strobe usually would.

Nine looks made the lookbook. The brand cut its studio e-commerce set in half for the season and used the field frames on product pages instead, and sell-through on the tailoring rose 38% against the previous autumn.