Domenico Vacca : Princess Leyla and Carlyle
Creative Director & Photographer
2014
Domenico Vacca
The Idea
The Carlyle Hotel. The address where Kennedy stayed during his presidency. The same corridors where Liza Minnelli performed private concerts, where Diana Ross checked in under a pseudonym, where New York's most powerful people go when they want to disappear from New York.
The brief was to shoot the Domenico Vacca womenswear campaign - a brand La Repubblica called "the Ferrari of clothing," whose clothes have appeared on Oscar winners and Hollywood A-listers across fifty films and television series.
The concept arrived from the address itself: Italian luxury meeting American power. Then it extended to open water - Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club on Long Island, one of the oldest yacht clubs in America, founded 1871. The Carlyle gives you the room. Seawanhaka gives you the horizon. Together they frame the complete world of a Domenico Vacca woman.
Luxury is not what you wear. It is the freedom to forget you are wearing anything at all. Eleonora Pieroni and Katya Taran did not perform that freedom for the camera - they simply arrived with it. The direction was finding the frames where that truth became undeniable.
The Challenge
Domenico Vacca does not need introduction in New York. That is precisely what makes this harder, not easier.
When a brand already owns its world - when its clothes have appeared on Denzel Washington, Al Pacino, Daniel Day-Lewis at the Oscars, when its headquarters sit on 5th Avenue, when its clients do not need to be told they have arrived - the campaign cannot try. Trying reads as insecurity. The images have to feel inevitable.
Deliver a campaign that performs simultaneously across three completely different scales and contexts without a single frame that feels constructed. One image had to stop foot traffic on the most photographed street in America. The same campaign had to carry a full editorial story in an international publication. A third had to work as an aerial geometric composition from a yacht bow. Three viewing contexts. One coherent visual language. All of it inevitable.
The Execution
Two location productions. One continuous creative vision.
Carlyle Hotel, New York City - interior shoot across the hotel's most storied spaces. Gilded mirrors, marble floors, the kind of light that has been falling on powerful people for a hundred years.
Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, Long Island, founded 1871 - exterior campaign on open water. Natural light, wind, the specific ease that comes from having nowhere more important to be.
Cast: Eleonora Pieroni - actress, model, and face of Domenico Vacca womenswear - and Katya Taran, model and HelloMonaco contributor. Matthew Fox, model and actor, joined the production as a last-minute replacement when the original male lead fell ill the morning of the shoot. He arrived, understood the brief immediately, and delivered without a single frame lost - impeccable under pressure. The contingency is invisible in the final work.
Full creative direction across both locations: concept development, location scouting and securing, styling direction, lighting design for two completely different environments, shot list, production management, and post-production oversight. The aerial composition from the yacht bow required precise timing and positioning - two figures, teak deck, dark water below, geometric symmetry. That image translated to billboard scale without losing intimacy.
Full crew: Hair - Addam Moreno. Makeup - Timoria McQueen. Stylist - Asanti Austin. Lighting - John Dee. Production - Sandy Griffin. Male Talent - Matthew Fox. Fashion - Domenico Vacca.
The Result
5th Avenue NYC billboard -Carlyle Hotel campaign imagery stopping foot traffic on one of the most photographed streets in the world. LA Times feature. Uomo Moderno full editorial story and back cover. Featured in 10+ international publications. Credited as Creative Director and Photographer across both productions.
PROJECT DOCUMENTATION
