Diogo Santilli
Photography . Video . Creative Direction
Diogo Santilli
Creative Direction.Photography.Video
Retail as
Collective Experience
CD.Photography.Set Design
Dover Street Market, 2018
For London Fashion Week 2018, I partnered with Liam Hodges, a quintessentially British designer, and channelled his rebellious energy into a tactile activation. His fixation on 80/90s television subcultures made flesh, his signature knitwear character, Mr. Bloop, morphed into a couch.
For this activation, I treated the shop floor as a set of “thinking rooms.” Partnering with photographer Sayuri Ichida and her acclaimed Absentee series, garments became propositions, an invitation to slow the gaze. Her introspective language disrupted retail rhythm, held in tension with Jil Sander’s minimal, architectural codes.
Liam’s idiosyncrasy sculpted the layout. My photography punctuated the walls, stillness turned kinetic, image folded into atmosphere. His visual codes bled through every pore of the structure: rebellious, whimsical, instantly shareable.
In dialogue with Raf Simons’ stark, confrontational language, Sayuri’s lens stripped fashion down to its visceral core, deconstructing form in a rejection of the traditional. The project spoke to an art aficionado crowd operating in-situ and as a photographic asset, feeding press, email campaigns, and social channels.