YKK 2016

The first chapter in the series of fashion films produced for Harim, Accademia Euromediterranea in Catania. The films stage the work of the academy’s students, made using zips supplied by YKK, the Japanese fastening manufacturer that supplied the school for years.

The origin of the project explains its shape. This is not a fashion house’s runway show: it is a school showing what its students can do, and an industrial supplier who wants to see its component used inventively. Two clients with different interests — teaching and product — that the film has to hold together.

Hence the directing problem that went on to define the whole series: a zip is a small, functional, distinctly unphotogenic object. Film it in close-up and it becomes a spec sheet; ignore it and you have failed the client. The route taken was to treat it as a narrative element — something that opens and closes, that divides and rejoins — and to build the shot around it rather than inserting it as a detail.

Filming took place across several locations in Sicily, chosen each time for the character of the landscape rather than for how well known it was.

The other chapters in the series are YKK 2018, YKK 2019 and YKK 2021.