Street style at the touch of a button

One innovative fashion agency has thrown out the old black portfolio of cuttings and is attracting new clients with music and video on CD-Rom. By Sophia Chauchard-Stuart

Photographic, design and modelling agencies have, until now, largely neglected the perfect commercial use for CD-Roms in their field: putting an agency's work on to CD-Rom to attract new business.

CD-Roms are individualistic products that can catch the imagination, unlike the rows of black portfolio cases of artists' tear sheets, which all tend to look the same. CD-Roms can also be kept on file as a constant record of the people an agency represents. The number of times portfolios get lost between base and possible clients should have persuaded agencies to embrace the technology by now.

Probably the first agency to present its work on CD-Rom was one of the smaller, more innovative companies, Rachel Collingwood Management, which represents everything from photographers to special PR, from product placements to casting and production events. It caters for clients worldwide seeking the quintessential British street-style look for their products.

Collingwood wanted to capture the personality of the people on her books and the concept of street style and funkiness that the agency embodies. The photographers' section is great, with the page divided in two; one part showing tear sheets of the photographers' best work, flicking past in time to the beat of the music, the other showing videos of the photographers themselves.

"It's important the client gets to see what the photographer is like," Collingwood says. "In this business, half of the client's eventual decision is liking what the photographer does, but half of it is if they get on with them. That's why I liked the idea of the little videos, which really show their personalities."

Unlike the large modelling agencies that have just transferred their models' Zed cards (showing their vital statistics and a few stills of their work) on to CD-Rom, the Rachel Collingwood Management CD-Rom tries to look at a different way to present the agency.

The hypnotic sound loop is vital in bringing the screen alive and creating a sense of excitement about the work. It also uses the point-and-click momentum to jump in and out of different sections at will instead of leaving the client to sit passively in front of their computer as the pages scroll by. The graphics are drawn in bold strokes with big blocks of colour that do not draw attention away from the video segments.

Using new technology also pitches the agency as a forward-looking operation, always useful in today's competitive market. And, as Collingwood admits, "At the end of the day, it was cheaper than doing a huge glossy brochure to sell the agency and the best thing for me is that the CD-Rom can be constantly updated."