World Poetry Day – everyone’s a poet

Happy World Poetry Day one and all!

This date hadn’t occurred to me until reading the wonderful Lucy Mangan in this week’s Stylist magazine, and though she decries the artform as not for her, even she manages to finish her column with a spontaneous burst of verse. Granted, she is a literary fireball, but in four short funny lines, she nailed a little ditty just like that:

“The boy stood on the burning deck,

His feet were full of blisters.

The flames came up and burned his pants

And now he wears his sister’s.”

Why not have a go today? You can pick anything – the most mundane subjects usually herald the funniest results – and pen a few lines. Share your efforts in the comments below.

I’ve recently rediscovered the sometimes therapeutic benefits of writing verse, which you can check out in the Poetry Please series.

*Image via addletters.com

Room to Read makes the Big Book Swap the new Book Club

Room to Read supports a cause very close to my heart (children’s literacy in the developing world), and is an organisation I am proud to support. Their premise is simple, clear to understand and significant: World change starts with educated children.

In recent months, my close group of girlfriends from school – whom I love dearly and who, lucky for me, I still get to see on a regular basis – have started a bit of a book club. It’s basically just another excuse to meet up over a bottle of wine, share good food and a good old gossip but, as well-educated young women, we also love a good read. And, we came to realise, we don’t read enough.

Well, imagine if we couldn’t read at all? Imagine if our fathers insisted that as soon as we were old enough to work in the local village, we dropped out of school and earned a decent wage instead? What if we couldn’t get to a school because it was so darn far away? Or because we had to look after our pain-in-the-ass younger brother instead?

I’m not going to get all charidee on you, but it’s worth thinking about, which is why I think Room to Read’s Big Book Swap is such a genius invention.

As a fundraising mechanism, it is a completely fluid concept, which is namely, this: instead of all going out and buying brand new copies of the same book, take your £8.99 (let’s round it up to £10) and put it in a central Big Book Swap pot for Room to Read. Then bring along a well-loved, well-read copy of your favourite book, and share that with the group instead. You learn a little bit more about each other’s past, reading habits and experience, you hopefully get introduced to a brand new title and you get the fuzzy warm glow of having given to charity.

And get this: every £10 you raise (give or take, that’s the price of one shiny new book in the UK) will buy you TEN local language books in Africa. TEN.

What’s not to love about that?

You can set up a small Big Book Swap with three of your closest friends. Or you can set up a table at work and get the whole building involved over the course of a day. You could host a fun singles evening at your local pub (bonus: all attendees will have at least one thing in common from the get-go, a love of books) or even a tea party for your kids and their friends after work. Take the concept into your school, university, office building or local sports club.

Or just use it as another excuse for a bottle of wine and a gossip.

But find a way to do it. The official day is Tuesday 29th March, and thy want to see as many events happening on that day as possible, but don’t be restricted by the day – the important thing is that you get involved. And to find out how to get your dosh to the nice folks at Room to Read (and to tell them about what a rip-roaring success your event was afterwards), email london@roomtoread.org.

And come and tell us what you think on Facebook too.

The Ralph Lauren Gang set out to charm American Moms

For the past two years, my office pod wall has been adorned with a quotation from Ralph Lauren, torn from a magazine advertisement for fashion website Brand Alley:

“I don’t design clothes, I design dreams”

Ever since I first came across it, this kernel of an idea has formulated my interest and belief in the power of brand communications. Marketing that goes beyond the product, that can trigger and play on emotion and aspiration – now that is powerful.

So it was with interest that I came across the latest development in Ralph Lauren’s marketing of their children’s wear. ‘The RL Gang’ has been created as a group of fictional child ambassadors for the label’s kids range, living for the most part online on a dedicated micro site. Visitors watch the video story unfold of Hudson, Willow and friends having fun and getting up to mischief in the schoolroom.

And all the while looking sensationally adorable, kitted out head-to-toe in the latest Ralph Lauren Kids back-to-school fall season range.

There’s no denying it, the film feature is beautifully produced. Traditional children’s book illustrations in fine-line ink and watercolour are interlaced with live action from the exceptionally cute child models as they run around their animated school yard. Added kudos is given by narration from Hollywood’s Harry Connick Jr.

The impression is a warm glow of child-like imagination and adventure, strongly conveying the sense (illusory or otherwise) that Ralph Lauren loves your kids as much as you do. The idea, of course, being that Mom logs on, watches how delightful Willow looks in her Cotton-Cashmere Sampler Jacket and thinks how cute her own offspring would look similarly attired.

Naturally, the route to purchase is instantaneous. Via links embedded throughout the film, Mom can hover over each of Willow’s garments and ‘shop W’s look’, taking her straight to the online store for purchase.

If a particular role model strikes a chord, Mom can even peek inside the little one’s ‘closet’ to skip through their personal style and view their particular collection – be it Oliver’s country-gentleman-in-the-making or Zoe’s more rock chick vibe. Mothers of wannabe Suri Cruise‘s can shop the Mae look.

But that’s not all. As a nice addition, RL has produced a kids storybook (yes, a real old-fashioned traditional paper page-turner) to go alongside the digital campaign that captures the story in an offline platform. In ten different languages no less. And a percentage of the proceeds from each $18.95 book sale go straight to charity. It’s a cute idea, and whilst the marketer in me thinks the book reads like a slightly more engaging version of the kidswear fall catalogue, essentially it’s a well-presented children’s story book that just so happens to dress all its characters in Ralph Lauren.

Because the production values are so strong, the video is highly watchable and I should imagine any Moms logging on do watch it in its entirety and that the click-through rate to the online store is high. It beautifully captures the brand values and presents them in a way that Moms can relate to – a visual representation of child-like imagination.

So to return to Ralph’s principle, The RL Gang sees the brand staying true to its guiding light. If it were just about the clothes, the brand could simply post a digital catalogue online. Ultimately, Moms hope for and dream of the very best for their kids, and The RL Gang has brought this to life perfectly.

Lady Dior: when literature shapes fashion

I had a feeling my Links of London post wouldn’t be the last LFW ad to grace this blog.

Flipping through the FT‘s fashion special of its weekly portion of riches, How to Spend It last weekend, I was again savouring all the luxury brand creatives as much as (if not more than) the editorial pieces between. Typical marketer I guess.

In the opening spread, the enviable elegance of the magnifique Marion Cotillard seeped from the Dior pages. But this time it was the choice of prop that caught my eye.

© Dior / FT

Granted, the striking red and black contrast of the composition called for a book jacket of the same – peeping out of Cotillard’s arm candy to add a subtle hint of literary culture to her undeniable beauty. But was Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye the only one the stylist could lay her hands on? Or was there something deeper that informed the choice?

I noticed it because Catcher happens to be one of my top three books of all time. The intensely human centre of the narrative has made it one the preeminent novels of the twentieth century. Perhaps the implication is that, like the book, Lady Dior and her purse of choice are truly iconic. So was it chance that the Penguin cover design happened to fit so sharply into Dior’s latest creative?

© Dior / FT

Either which way, the choice was interesting. While high fashion houses like Dior spend hundreds of thousands on advertising creatives inventing a luxury world which its audience buys into (the classic, ‘buy the lifestyle not just the product’), essentially they do need to shift sales. When said product is included in shot, you can bank on every effort having been made to draw your attention to it.

Does the bag have the same presence of focus in the image with the book removed?

Thus, arguably, in this particular composition, Catcher has a greater starring role than Cotillard.

But for those more interested in the bag than its contents, you can snap up the ‘Le 30′ black lambskin leather number with ‘Cannage’ embroidery for a mere £1,550 from Dior.com now. Random fact? The Le 30 range owes its name to the number 30 in Christian Dior’s Avenue de Montaigne address.

My favourite? Well, it has to be the pink really doesn’t it. And just a snip at £1,290:

© Dior.com

Douglas Coupland: an insight

So after a total age I finally finished Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma today (worth a read but be prepared, the end gets whack).

Anyway, Harper Perennial the publishers have this cool addition to all his works where they give bit of back story to each novel and some stuff on Coupland to finish off the book. The timing was funny – I was just walking along thinking I really should learn more about the man himself and his life in order to further understand his works when I came across a quickfire Q & A in the back of the book.

So here it is:

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Right now. Where I am. At home.

What is your greatest fear? That God exists, but doesn’t care very much for humans.

Which living person do you most admire? Vaclav Havel. [yeah, I didn't have a clue either]

What objects do you always carry with you? Earplugs.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life? Everybody I like and love all living in the same city.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you? We have time and we have free will. Otherwise we’re just animals.

Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work? Jenny Holzer, an American artist whose work is text-based (what a dismal term. How tightly can you compress an idea? Where do ideas end and you, as a person, begin?

Do you have a favourite book? Non-fiction, The Andy Warhol Diaries. Fiction, it’s either Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers or Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age.

Where do you go for inspiration? Four-hour drives in my car, usually into the interior of British Columbia, into the desert cordillera that stretches from BC down into Mexico. Believe it or not, Canada has cactuses/cacti.

Which book do you wish you had written? The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm.

What are you writing at the moment? A new novel, Eleanor Rigby.

And if you want a few more daily gems, follow the man himself on Twitter @DougCoupland.