Second Skin

Mira's promise is honesty about ingredients. The campaign had to be just as honest about the people wearing them.

A 45-second film, eight portraits and a stills campaign for print and out of home.

The 45-second film moves between the eight people in one continuous morning light. Each portrait also stands alone as a short film of its own, for social and for the product pages.

The stills were made for large formats: posters at bus stops, double pages in magazines. No retouching was part of the agreement from the start, and the print briefs said so.

We cast eight customers instead of models and shot every portrait by a north-facing window, one morning each.

Casting took longer than the shoot. We met more than sixty people who had written to Mira over the years and chose eight who wanted to be seen as they are, not as a campaign.

Each morning started with coffee and no camera. We shot on one lens at close distance and graded only for consistency between the days, never to change the skin itself.

The campaign ran for a year and set the visual language for everything Mira has made since.

The posters were photographed and shared by people who recognised a neighbour, a teacher or themselves. Mira received more letters in that year than in the five before.

Three of the eight have since appeared in Mira's later work, and the north-facing window has become the studio's standard for every product shot.