Essence By Joann

Women's boutiques online tend to look alike: pale grounds, thin capitals, a grid of forty trend pieces styled head to toe. Essence sells a short edit, and every piece in it is meant to carry the outfit by itself. Everything else is jeans and boots.

So the brand works the same way. Every surface gets one loud thing: the piece, or the wordmark when no piece is shown.

Fashion marks reach for thin capitals and script. Essence is set in PP Migra Extrabold, lowercase and hand-kerned, its three e's carrying the face's slanted crossbar. BY JOANN always sits beneath it, so the name belongs to her and to no one else.

On the website the lockup runs the full width of the first film, then docks into the header as the film scrolls away.

Every colour was sampled from the clothes: the cream and stone of the houndstooth, the black of the faux leather, the saffron of the tie-neck print, the bronze and gold of the jumpsuit, the cocoa of the buttons. The brand wears what it sells.

Two settings, one way of seeing. In the studio, a grey sweep and nothing between the viewer and the piece. Around New York, stone, water and autumn light. Each frame holds one garment in focus; the rest of the outfit stays plain, and often out of frame.

Shot on the same days at sixty frames a second and played at half speed, the films slow the city to the pace of the clothes: a jacket at a park balustrade, a jumpsuit walking past the library, a call taken between buildings, the light on a fabric's surface.

On the website they play silent and only while in view, so the pieces move without a sound.

The homepage opens on film: the houndstooth jacket on a New York street, with the lockup at full width across it. Scroll, and the lockup shrinks into the header, where it stays.

Below it, the page runs as a single Tuesday, from the coffee run to a late dinner. Each piece gets a screen of its own with its hour, its moment and a way to shop it, a small clock in the corner keeps the time, and the ground darkens as the day goes on.

The shop keeps the same restraint. The edit shows all six pieces on one page, filtered by kind, and a size can go into the bag straight from the card. Each piece has a page of its own: the photographs one at a time, the sizes, how many are left, and the hour it is worn in the homepage's Tuesday, linked back to it.

A closer look runs through the site, one detail per fabric, near enough to see the grain of the faux leather and the weave of the houndstooth. Add a size and the bag slides in from the side: the piece, its size and one button to check out.

Every page ends on the lockup. As the footer comes into view the letters arrive as outlines one by one, fill from left to right, and BY JOANN settles beneath them; a sheen passes over the word every few seconds after that.