Women's
Behind The Book: The Irish Manor & Moorlands
For the October men’s issue of The Book, Neiman Marcus art director Cesar Ramirez and his creative team shot Fall’s rugged yet refined men’s trends in their natural element – Ireland.
“We set out to find a location that would speak to that, something with indoor and outdoor possibilities,” Ramirez says of the multifunctional backdrop needed to canvas both the season’s sophisticated suiting and its utilitarian hiking boots and parkas. “So we found a beautiful manor house just outside of Dublin and some amazing moorland in the area that was part of the famous Guinness Estate.”
The Irish moorlands
The manor house
Whereas most photographers pray for a clear sky, Ramirez says they were drawn to the location because of its overcast and rolling fog.
“Another reason for looking at Ireland was the weather,” he says. “We were interested in the misty, overcast, dense fog and clouds that is so common in that area.”
But when the Neiman Marcus creative team touched down in Ireland, the weather decided not to cooperate.
“The day we scouted the locations, it had the perfect weather for our story, but then it completely changed and we never saw the gloomy side we wanted,” Ramirez says. “Our scheduled shooting days were all over the place. We were having to chase weather and look for the right angles to capture the look and feel we had intended for this story.”
The story starts at a remote manor with models wearing modern tailored wool plaid suits amongst portraits and dusty covered furniture.
“Checks and plaids had a strong presence in the men’s world for the Fall so we wanted to depict this trend in our images,” he says of the story’s anglophile looks that included a wool Halston tuxedo, a Brioni olive plaid jacket and Prada burgundy calfskin lace ups.
The manor setting is followed by a jaunt in the Irish moorlands, where a search for a model dog led to an impromptu conversation with a local and a winning shot.
“We wanted to find the perfect, well trained field spaniel or a well-groomed fox terrier to use for an image, but it felt all too stylized, so we ended up using a working sheepdog [border collie] to get our shot,” he says. “The best part of it was its owner, a local resident with just the right character. We asked him to stand by our model to get the dog in the right spot and they immediately struck up a conversation. It took a slight moment for the photographer to snap a picture —and that moment was captured.”
The sheep dog and his owner
“It was so spontaneous and looked so authentic, that we ended up running that shot in The Book,” says Ramirez.
An off-camera conversation makes the pages of The Book
Another surprise was the unexpected royal visit.
“We got out of Dublin just a day before the streets literally closed down,” says Ramirez, who just missed his chance to see the Queen of England. “Her four-day visit to Ireland was the first by a British monarch since George V almost 100 years ago.”
View The October Men’s Book on NeimanMarcus.com or download NM Editions for the iPad.
