Why This Summer’s Fashion Campaigns Are All-In on Retro Escapism

A one-night-only carnival in Austin last month had everything you’d expect — a Ferris wheel, water games with stuffed animal prizes, stalls offering hot dogs and funnel cakes and gingham-covered picnic tables — but with an unexpected sponsor.

The “Cowboy Carnival” was hosted by athleisure label Set Active to celebrate the release of its State Fair collection — the brand’s lineup of summer products — as well as its new pop-up shop in the city, which is open until the fall. The brand sold 500 customers $12 tickets to the event, where they could partake in carnival activities and shop the brand’s Austin-exclusive merchandise early, too.

The goal with both the collection and the corresponding activation, according to founder and chief executive Lindsey Carter, was to “[channel] really authentic Americana nostalgia.” And it resonated: the brand hit its monthly sales target within 48 hours of opening the pop-up.

It’s a theme popping up all over fashion’s summer campaigns amid a growing consumer desire for all things analog. From J.Crew’s “Camp Crew” campaign starring a bevy of 2010s supermodels to Rhode’s Newport, Rhode Island pop-up with lobster rolls and basket-adorned bicycles, brands are leaning into symbols associated with what consumers see as a simpler time — whether they remember it or not.

It’s not just Americana: Chloé is channeling its signature 1970s ease with bohemian campaign imagery starring Apple Martin, the daughter of 1990s icon Gwyneth Paltrow, paired with vintage postcards advertising its seasonal summer shops. After seeing sales rise last summer, Pucci is capitalising on that momentum with ads rooted in 1960s jet-set Italian glamour, with bouffant-coiffed models posing seaside.

“The summer specifically is when you think of nostalgia and the past,” said J.Crew’s chief marketing officer, Julia Collier. “It relates to school holidays, you’re off school, you have no commitments, you’re just hanging out with friends, or you’re going to camp.”

But when so many brands, from luxury houses to accessible beauty brands, use a similar filter, these escapist campaigns can start to feel that they’re tapping into the very corporatisation consumers want to avoid. To survive the sea of sameness and avoid coming off as hollow, brands are connecting digital campaigns to physical spaces to move the summer fantasy beyond the screen and enable consumers to actively engage with the analog ideal they’re projecting.

“The brands that stand out … are saying something a bit more specific,” said Lucy Robertson, global head of brand at creator marketing agency Buttermilk. “Summer is so broad and crowded, so simply recreating a beach club or camp aesthetic is just not going to be enough.”

Collective Memory

The nostalgia-fuelled summer marketing moments that resonate the most are those that highlight memories that are broadly relatable.

For both Set and J.Crew, for instance, their campaign concepts were the product of team brainstorms around their own summer memories, landing on moments that felt resonant to everyone in the room.

“Everyone on my team is American, and so they all have their own camp stories, their camp rituals, stories from growing up, being counselors,” said Collier, who, being British, brings an outsider’s perspective to the table. Lake culture, they decided, felt uniquely North American.

The goal was to create a campaign that shoppers could see their own experience in. While most Americans haven’t vacationed in luxe seaside hot spots like the Hamptons and Nantucket, setting the campaign around a lake would resonate far beyond the East Coast. The brand also hosted a Camp Crew media trip, inviting tastemakers like Liana Satenstein and Terrence O’Connor to a lake house in the Adirondacks for three days. Online, however, the brand was careful not to name the specific lake or town where it was set in order to make it easier for consumers to tie it back to their own experience.

“We wanted to leave it open to people to interpret and to make it their own,” said Collier. “It needed to be universal, so it could feel inclusive and applicable.”

Many of this year’s campaigns tapped recent references that have already entered the modern vernacular of an idealised version of summer. Mango’s ten-day “Slow Summer” pop-up on Hydra, a pedestrian-only Greek island, in June, included a seaside cinema on the rocks of Spilia, a popular swimming area, showing a variety of nostalgic films selected by Spanish actress Rossy de Palma — including “Call Me By Your Name,” which was shot in northern Italy in 2017 and evokes a “romantic version of summer that’s been embedded in pop culture,” said Robertson.

“They were using it as cultural shorthand to evoke this feeling of nostalgia, even for something that happened only 10 years ago,” she added. The brand also shared a curation of addresses on the island selected by local writer Josh Hickey, from his favourite library, bakery and pharmacy to the Spilia rocks themselves — where Hickey typically swims in the mornings, adding to the local feel of the cinema.

British womenswear label Fruity Booty also took an early-2000s Mediterranean vacation approach to its summer pop-ups in New York and Los Angeles this season, featuring souvenir shop-style postcard displays and T-shirts reminiscent of a childhood getaway. While those pieces might have felt kitsch or disposable at the time, said Robertson, they have now become more aspirational because of the emotional value they carry.

“The aesthetics that can resonate are ones that make us feel a little bit comfy, a bit imperfect, a bit slower, a bit tactile,” said Robertson. “People remember details.”

Making Nostalgia New

Pegging nostalgia to something new is always crucial to ensure retro marketing doesn’t feel stale.

For J.Crew, reuniting five former Victoria’s Secret Angels who hit their apex of popularity in the mid-2010s was the way to give the old-school theme an extra oomph. Because they were the “pinnacle of cool” at the time, as Collier said, they were the perfect stand-in for counselors at Camp Crew, knowing that those are the people younger campers usually look up to.

“In meshing those new things together, it feels somewhat more recent and contemporary, as well as feeling nostalgic,” said Robertson.

Chloé’s “À la Plage” campaign starring Apple Martin tapped classic European summer imagery, with Martin posing in the sand, clutching seashells and fruit, dappled in a hazy, golden light with a dreamlike quality. But the brand is also opening seven seasonal boutiques across Europe, reopening its summer shops in classic summer destinations like Capri and St. Tropez, while also launching in more low-key destinations like the Spanish island of Formentera. The combination of the two not only adds a feeling of newness to the brand’s 1970s aesthetics, but also turns the feeling of retro escapism into something tangible for customers.

“The last few years of nostalgia marketing … have largely been about escaping reality,” said Robertson. “I wonder if the next phase of this is actually building something that people want to stay in, rather than kind of temporarily escape to.”