Combine Saks Fifth Avenue, leading fashion brands and the Sony Pictures Animation feature, The Emoji Movie, and what do you get? A custom designed, emoji-inspired fashion collection, available exclusively at Saks New York flagship and Beverly Hills stores, as well as Saks.com.
The “Saks Fifth Avenue x The Emoji Movie” collection features ready-to-wear clothing and shoes from design houses such as Jason Wu, Mackage, Del Toro Footwear, Orlebar Brown, Gents and Havianas. This fashion and film collaboration may seem like an unusual partnership at first, but John Antonini, Saks Fifth Avenue Director of Stores explains why Saks and Sony Pictures Animation have created the perfect synergy, “…the smiley emoji is a big part of the movie and it sort of sums up how customers should feel when they interact with Saks Fifth Avenue. They should walk into our stores, go to our website and feel happy.”
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| John Antonini |
In honor of the “Saks Fifth Avenue x The Emoji Movie” collection, Saks has devoted six windows at its Fifth Avenue store to an immersive fashion and film experience that allows viewers to interact with emoji characters from the film. The windows were unveiled last week at a red carpet event that took place, appropriately enough, on World Emoji Day. “I think that when you talk about The Emoji Movie, it has to be about fun, Antonini explained, “When people use emojis today, it’s about bringing to life their emotions in different ways, and I think putting that together in our windows with product from some of our favorite designers, really brings that all together for us.”
On hand for The Emoji Movie event were members of the cast, including T. J. Miller, Maya Rudolph, Jake T. Austin and Liam Aiken. Also in attendance were the film’s director, Tony Leondis, and producer, Michelle Kouyate, as well as designers, Sony Pictures executives and fans of fashion and the movie like Paula Abdul.
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| Tony Leondis |
In keeping with the expressive theme of the movie, Leondis, a native New Yorker, was very enthusiastic as he reflected on the way in which the film came about,“ in animation we’re always looking for new worlds to discover and I was thinking about my next movie, what I wanted to make and I looked down on the phone and I saw these emojis and I thought ‘Oh My goodness there’s a whole world that exists in our phones and there’s already a society that is inherent, which is everybody has to be their one thing’ so the smiler always has to smile, even if she’s really angry and the frowner is always frowning. So I thought it would be interesting to do a story inside the phone and explore what that would be. What happens behind the scenes?” And how does Leondis feel about Saks Fifth Avenue and fashion becoming a part of the equation? “Oh my gosh, I am so thrilled! We spend so much time on our production design and our color and how to light a sequence and how to bring these worlds to life…and so I’m thrilled that other designers could get inspired by something we did.”
The Emoji Movie opens nationwide on July 28th. Saks Fifth Avenue New York Flagship windows will be live through the end of July.
– Rhonda Erb
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