A Little Bit About Trying to “Get” Mel Ottenberg
So, I’ve been down a rabbit hole looking at Mel Ottenberg’s stuff. You know, the guy who styled Rihanna, now running Interview Magazine. I was trying to, like, figure out his whole vibe. It’s not exactly my usual thing, but you gotta admit, the looks he pulls together are pretty bold. They make you stop and stare.
I spent some time just flipping through images, trying to see if there was a secret sauce. Like, is it just about shock value, or is there something deeper? I’d look at one outfit and think, ‘Okay, that’s wild,’ then another and think, ‘Huh, that actually makes sense in a weird way.’ It’s a practice, I guess, trying to dissect someone’s creative process. Not that I’m aiming to be a fashion guru or anything. Far from it.
This whole thing, though, it kinda dragged up a memory from way back. It’s funny how your brain connects things. This was when I was working at this small marketing company, super eager, you know? We had this client, a pretty conservative local business, and they wanted a ‘fresh’ campaign. My boss, bless his cotton socks, was an old-school guy but he said, ‘Go on, give it a shot, try something new.’
So, what do I do? I get this bright idea to make it all ‘edgy’ and ‘unexpected.’ I’d been seeing all this high-fashion stuff, probably got some Ottenberg-esque images in my head without even realizing it back then, and thought, ‘Yeah, let’s push the envelope!’ I cooked up this whole concept that was, let’s just say, very different from their usual ads featuring smiling families and reliable products.
- Think dark, moody photography for a friendly hardware store.
- Abstract slogans that nobody could quite figure out.
- Models looking like they’d rather be anywhere else.
I was so proud of it. Thought I was a genius, bringing this high-concept art to suburban retail. I presented it with all this fancy talk about ‘disruption’ and ‘subverting expectations.’ My boss just sat there, squinting. The clients? Oh boy. You could hear a pin drop. Then one of them, a sweet old lady who co-owned the place, just said, ‘But dear, where are the hammers?’
It totally bombed. Like, spectacularly. I didn’t get fired, but I got a very long, very gentle lecture about ‘knowing your audience’ and ‘brand identity.’ For weeks, my main job was sorting a massive pile of returned brochures that I’d so confidently designed. Talk about a humbling experience. My ‘edgy’ campaign was just confusing and, frankly, a bit alienating for their customers.
Looking back, it’s almost comical. I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, applying a style I didn’t fully grasp to a situation where it just didn’t fit. It’s like seeing someone with Ottenberg’s level of confidence and specific vision and thinking you can just copy-paste it. You can’t. There’s context, there’s understanding, there’s an actual point to it, even if it looks chaotic from the outside.
So yeah, whenever I see someone really owning a unique style, whether it’s Ottenberg or anyone else who’s truly original, I get a little flashback to my hardware store fiasco. It’s a good reminder, I suppose. Being bold is one thing, but being cluelessly bold? That’s a recipe for a pile of useless brochures. Maybe the real practice is figuring out your own thing, not just trying to be a faint echo of someone else’s cool.
