Whistles turns 50 and casts its campaign from the street

Whistles has marked its fiftieth birthday by casting its advertising from the street. The fashion brand’s new platform, Designed for an Open Mind, was built with the creative agency Weirdo and launches with a campaign featuring fifty real women aged nineteen to seventy-two, found through posters around London that asked applicants what open-mindedness meant to them. More than two thousand people replied.

The fifty were photographed by Alice Neale in the current collection and interviewed about their lives, and those interviews became the campaign film, directed by Archi Shah. It caps a twelve-month programme of experiments between brand and agency, including a project that had a group of real friends document themselves wearing the High Summer collection on a trip to Athens. Creative Review reported the launch.

The identity work follows the same instinct. The logo stays, but around it sits a new typeface, Founders Grotesk Condensed, a citrus signature colour named Lemonade, and an asterisk recovered from a detail of an earlier Whistles logo, now used as a mark of curiosity before each new project. Weirdo calls the organising idea “sharp and light”, after the two sounds a whistle can make, and has loosened the photography rules to keep the observational feel of the campaign.

Real-people casting is now a well-worn route, and it has been since Dove built a decade of advertising on it. What makes this version interesting is that the casting method is the idea: recruiting for a stated value rather than a look, then letting the interviews write the script. For a mid-market fashion brand squeezed from both ends, distinctiveness is cheaper than reach, and a fiftieth birthday is a licence to spend on it. Where it settles among the year’s identity work is a question for our rebrand ranking at the end of the year.