Product Photography Doesn’t Have To Be Boring

From Burberry’s sailing trench coats to Saint Laurent heels as dessert: how luxury brands turned product shots into surrealist storytelling

Courtesy of Burberry, Harry Winston, and Saint Laurent.

The Image as Idea

A Burberry trench coat sets sail across stormy seas, its check pattern catching wind like canvas. No model in sight. No body to fill it. Just fabric, transformed into something it was never meant to be, yet somehow still perfectly Burberry. Gabardine was invented by Thomas Burberry himself in 1947 to weather the British rain. Here, it does again; only this time, at sea. The caption reads: Anchored in heritage. A perfect visual pun.

Saint Laurent’s latest accessories campaign turns the aftermath of dinner into a still life of temptation: heels on fruit platters, handbags stacked on piles of dishes, jewellery resting on jelly desserts. Fashion styled as appetite. A world where fashion, the mundane, and the absurd meet across the table.

Van Cleef & Arpels lets its jewellery bloom: earrings become petals, necklaces flutter midair. Harry Winston drapes diamonds across flamingos and cats, gems held delicately in a parrot’s beak.

Product photography exists to show the product. But the best campaigns aren’t just showing what the product is, they’re showing what it means. They create pattern interruptions—visual moments so unexpected your brain has to stop and process them. And in the attention economy, that pause is worth more than perfection.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE. When Everyone Can Shoot Beautiful Products, Imagination Becomes the Advantage

Good lighting, perfect composition, flawless retouching: these are table stakes now. E-commerce trained us to expect visual precision. Those images still serve a purpose, of course. But the brands breaking through have moved beyond perfection into concept, where products stop being products and start becoming stories.

Three strategies are emerging, each driven by different psychological mechanisms. Together, they’re redefining what luxury product photography can do.

1. Impossible Realities: When Products Enter Fantastical Worlds

Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels, Burberry, and Cartier.