Moves of the Linen Variety: A look at the Making of GAP’s Latest Love Letter to Linen
When GAP’s Creative Director, Calvin Leung, first saw Jungle’s music video for “Back on 74,” he was up late at night, glued to the screen. He didn’t know exactly what to make of it; all Leung knew was that he had to get GAP on board—stat. “It stopped me right in my tracks,” he exclaimed. Like most collaborative feats of the modern day, GAP’s Linen Moves started with a DM. With a swift swipe and a fierce tap, Leung and his team at GAP reached out to Director Charlie Di Placido. Soon after, Di Placido joined forces with Jungle co-founder J Lloyd, and the American fashion house got to work.
The fruit of their labor, Linen Moves, is a kinetic celebration of individuality based on the concept that the linen of GAP's spring collection acts as a canvas for its wearers to define the textile with their motions. Choreographed by Shay Latukolan, it features Grammy award-winning South African Singer-Songwriter Tyla and a cast of linen-clad dancers in one seriously smooth number. Together, they flow, keel, and clap as the camera pans from one group to the next. And while the film itself is a treat to the choreography-craving eye, perhaps even greater pleasure can be derived from witnessing the process behind it. The thirteen-minute documentary, The Making Of: Linen Moves, delves into the budding collaboration between the brilliant minds (and bodies) behind Linen Moves and documents its creative process. From its inception to the final take, we’re brought on a ride-along of joyous dance and fuzzy camaraderie.
In the film, we see how the inspiration to expand on “Back on 74” blossomed into a coquettish dialogue of movement in which the contemporary cool flirts with the tropes of courtship from midcentury dance, harking back to works like West Side Story and Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free. But the narrative-redolent choreography of yore was something Latukolan decided to move past. “With this [project], I wanted to [focus] on a feeling instead of a story,” Latukolan shared. “The goal was for everyone to have a moment in [the] frame and feel like they were royalty through the movement, [paired] with the clothing, which felt bright and powerful.”
Dance moves aside, what lends the campaign its hook of inviting warmth is the intimacy portrayed in the motions shared between its cast members. On set, chemistry brewed, bubbled, and foamed over as Di Placido, Lloyd, and Latukolan got granular in directing body proximity, gestures, and expressions. As evidenced by the swooning Zoomers in the comments section of the videos circulating on social media, sparks indeed flew.
In the rehearsals captured in the film, Jungle’s velvety vocals pour over the frontal lobe like a warm syrup. As its dancers smoothly sway to and fro, the film exudes an ethereal, almost oblique feel as we follow the cast and crew behind the camera on a joyride. Through a flurry of linen, a kaleidoscopic vision of dance emerges, diffracting the many personalities of its cast into a dance pulsing with vibrance. As the saying goes, sometimes the journey is more important than the destination. Thanks to The Making Of: Linen Moves, you don’t have to decide between the two.
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