Scotch & Soda Pays Tribute to the City's Spirit in Amsterdams Around the World

Amsterdam-based fashion label Scotch & Soda abandons the practical and easy in the latest chapter of its brand campaign ‘From Amsterdam, From Everywhere’. The brand unearthed an entire Atlas of Amsterdams, choosing the most off-the-grid and least film-crew-friendly of them all for its campaign mainstage. Why? “Because that’s exactly what we want to capture; the spirit that’s at our core,” says CMO of Scotch & Soda, Adam Kakembo, of the breath-taking film and accompanying print work. “We know Amsterdam is very important to who we are, yet it goes beyond the geography of one place – it’s the openness, free-thinking and perseverance that sets us apart. Our latest campaign is a fittingly impractical celebration of that”.

 

A compact crew of just two flew around the world in thirteen days capturing the differing beauty of the other Amsterdams. Publicis133, Paulo Martins, elaborates on his find, “Our Amsterdammer predecessors didn’t make it easy for us: we found one Amsterdam in eastern South Africa, a tiny village in Ohio, USA, and an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The drone crew needed to island hop by several planes, then by boat – needing a translator and a local guide to secure footage in the uninhabited one we unearthed in West Guinea”.

Another larger crew, including rising director Fleur Fortuné and fashion and landscape photographer Elisabeth Toll dispatched to Amsterdam Island, in the Arctic. An island that’s only reachable by an 18-hour boat trip; a place Google Street View hasn’t even reached, and where walruses and polar bears outnumber people.

 

The seemingly endless Arctic plains that defy the 16 sq km surface of Amsterdam Island, make for the perfect mainstage for a beautiful, other-worldly cast dressed in the brand’s Fall-Winter ’17 explorer-themed collection. And, so it is here they trek frozen fjords towards snow-capped peaks, while the voiceover parallels this icy beauty with the beauty of Keizersgracht, the Singel and the Dam.

 

Scotch & Soda’s latest campaign is both a celebration of the vision of Amsterdammers of old that once saw land in sea, that once made it to remote isles like this one.  And, a celebration of a new generation’s “mind and soul Amsterdammers” - all those who can “imagine something from nothing”. Because, says Scotch & Soda, “Amsterdam is wherever you want it to be”.