It was crazy, but then so is the brand that paid for all this mayhem. Folli Follie (Crazy Craziness in Italian) was founded in 1982 and it will celebrate 30 years of almost non-stop growth next year. To mark the anniversary and a major new expansion programme in China, Folli Follie’s founders, Ketty and Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, threw open the doors of their villa on the Greek island of Spetses to make the brand’s Spring-Summer 2012 campaign.
It was the first time the couple’s very private retreat had ever been used for such an intrusive purpose.
The director was Alastair Banks Griffin, who arrived hot from the Cannes Film Festival, where he had won an award; and there was not a single toy that had not been put at the crew’s disposal – a sleek black helicopter, a gleaming Harley Davidson, sports cars and speedboats.
It was as if they were shooting a new James Bond movie. As 2 turned to 3 am, the sleek creative types from New York, Los Angeles and Paris were showing signs of fashion fatigue.
Their eyelids and designer jeans were all starting to sag. But then the music began to play, and Ketty and Dimitris got up to dance, their buoyant energy making them seem as light as the soft night air and injecting a new sense of purpose into the much younger film crew.
“We just love to dance,” says Ketty, who has so much vim and vigour she could probably solve the Greek debt crisis in five minutes, should anybody care to ask her to. “There’s no excuse for not letting your feelings show, if they have something genuine to say.”
Mrs. Ketty, as everybody seems to call her, is rarely lost for words, and most of her discourse is directed towards one goal – turning everything she does for Folli Follie into a perfect mix of fashion and fun, with a big dash of high style thrown in.
It was 2 am on a warm Mediterranean morning last August, and a caffeine-fuelled gang of dressers, gaffers and make-up artists surrounded her, because that’s the kind of team you need to shoot a major new advertising campaign and an interactive Web movie in four days. Nearby, a director and producer stared at a monitor as they argued about camera angles.
For the new campaign, Gaile has to play three different characters – Rock Gaile, Classic Gaile and Trendy Gaile. The set-up is a repeat of the campaign that Gaile and Ketty shot together in Paris for the brand’s Autumn Winter 2011 season.
The first day’s action had the air of a dress rehearsal. The team retreated to the pool house Mrs. Ketty and Dimitris had designed and built for them on the edge of the residence…..Read more stories in Quintessentially Asia.
