Mary Katrantzou’s Website Launches

It has said ‘Coming Soon’ for 4 years, but November 18th is the launch date for Mary Katrantzou’s new e-tail site. A special animated countdown featuring women dressed in Katrantzou’s designs will mark the time to the launch. Four women will represent the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the site’s official launch. Every time the clock strikes 12, the models’ outfits will change.

The site will initially offer 25 exclusive looks based on Katrantzou’s resort collection — the first she has ever done. The designer said that while the prints are the same as those in the full resort collection, they appear on different silhouettes than in the bigger collection.

The new site will ship to Europe, and has partnered exclusively with LIST for distribution in the U.S.

In anticipation of the launch, the designer has also produced a series of films — each a minute long — that relate to the passage of time, and to the Katrantzou collections. “It’s very surreal,” she said of the short films that will run on the site.

As reported, for her first resort collection, Katrantzou worked into her prints her own photographs of high-rise apartment towers in São Paulo, the snow-capped Swiss Alps, French flower fields, a Japanese bridge, an Italian vineyard, a Chinese fisherman and railway station arcades.

Katrantzou said the resort images were shot by Nicholas Alan Cope, while the clock visuals on the site and the accompanying digital campaign were created by the New York-based creative agency Johannes Leonardo.