The email Tatia Pilieva sent to 21 people Monday morning started off the way such notes usually do when someone wants to get a link on Facebook.
“Hey my dears,” Ms. Pilieva wrote. “I wanted to share our little film with you.”
The email’s recipients had starred in a video that Ms. Pilieva had recently directed on a shoestring budget for a small clothing company.
The three-and-a-half-minute video, shot in black and white, showed 10 pairs of strangers kissing for the first time.
“Here are the links,” she wrote. “Feel free to share as you wish.”
That wish was the Internet’s command. By Thursday afternoon, the video — titled “First Kiss” — was a bona fide viral sensation.
A YouTube link had about 42 million views. A Vimeo link had been watched an additional 1.5 million times. (By comparison, President Obama’s appearance on the popular online comedy show, “Between Two Ferns,” posted Tuesday morning, had about one-third the traffic.) For the designer, it wasn’t exactly supposed to work this way.
Melissa Coker, 35, the founder and creative director of the clothing company Wren, commissioned the video to showcase her clothing line’s fall collection for Style.com’s Video Fashion Week. Style.com had created the video series for brands that might lack the financial wherewithal to put on a runway show during Fashion Week.
The video’s outrageous popularity had the web abuzz all week, with some industry experts suggesting that it could force major designers to think more expansively about how to advertise future collections.
“She gets better attention here than an actual fashion show during Fashion Week,” said André Leon Talley, the artistic director at Zappos Couture, who used to be Ms. Coker’s boss at Vogue. “You can’t reach 40 million viewers in an 11- to 15-minute fashion runway presentation.” (...)
The label, which is based in Los Angeles, has four employees, including Ms. Coker. The budget for the video was about $1,300, with the money used for studio space, a video editor’s babysitting bill, lunch and “chocolate and some mints,” Ms. Pilieva said. The kissing strangers are friends of Ms. Coker and Ms. Pilieva’s. Many are musicians or models. All of them worked free.
The video begins with the 10 couples each facing off, some of them in awkward pas de deux. As the short film progresses, the couples kiss — a few of them passionately, some clumsily. But what was it that made it resonate with millions of drive-by clickers?
by John Koblin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tatia Pilieva
