Our idea was to celebrate diversity in a surprising and innovative way – to stay true to the Benetton brand, to incorporate the design inspiration story, and tap into a cultural tension and be relevant to that moment in time.

We decided to create models for our next shoot – not use existing ones – Benetton’s traditional ‘ethnic rainbow’ approach to casting was about to get a modern twist. We decided that we could physically demonstrate the beauty of diversity by creating new faces that represented the different ethnic mixes of they key fashion capitals of the world. By using a simple human face, we could make complex ethnographic information accessible and meaningful in a split second. This creative visualisation of demographic data had never been done in the way we envisioned for our campaign – we needed to gather the data ourselves and commission a bespoke algorithm to achieve our vision.

Each Face Of The City became a beautiful representation of diversity, which created a perfect platform to showcase the new collection. Models were cast to fit each face, then styled in key items from the collection and shot by a fashion photographer on the famous white backdrop, staying true to the powerful stage United Colors of Benetton has built their brand on. The faces and bodies were composited together, to form our diverse new models. We created titles for each City Face that remained true to the brand by using the Benetton typeface, with a twist – the type was individually created as “stitched type”, designed to look like letters had been sewn with yarn. The faces of the collection lived on their own as stand-alone pieces of interest, as well as in a group, forming an accurate and powerful snapshot of the current diversity in the world’s major

The Face of the City was a digital, print and retail-focused campaign that ran for eight weeks, with paid media concentrated most heavily in southern Europe: Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. However, considering the earned reach of our idea extended across the globe, hitting the press in the UK and the US. Given we did not have hard metrics to hit, we measured our success qualitatively – we engaged consumers worldwide with our data-led creative idea and positioned Benetton as a relevant, innovative and modern brand with a point of view – achieving our mandated brand-building goals. In making Face of the City, we used to data to create something truly (and literally) human, highlighting the important truth that we are all people no matter our race, and bringing a whole new meaning to the fashion rhetoric ‘face of the campaign’.