Neil Kraft, who oversaw advertising campaigns for Barneys New York, Esprit and Calvin Klein that pushed cultural boundaries — including one in which a young rapper named Marky Mark sported little more than a grin and a pair of Calvin Klein underwear — died on Sept. 6 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 67.
The cause was cancer, his son Marley said.
In the mid-1980s, Barneys was morphing from a high-end men’s store in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — far from the carriage-trade department stores uptown — into a luxury retail emporium. To promote the store’s new image as a fomenter of trends and a destination worth heading downtown for, the Pressmans, the family behind Barneys, created their own advertising agency.
They hired Mr. Kraft to run the shop — a young team that included Paula Greif, an art director who had been making music videos, and her friend Glenn O’Brien, the tart writer, editor and music critic. The work they created was groundbreaking for its time and emblematic of its fizzy 1980s moment.
For one television commercial, Ms. Greif and the photographer and director Peter Kagan, with whom she had made some of those music videos, shot the supermodel Paulina Porizkova dressing and going about her day as if she were in a French New Wave movie. They filmed it with Mr. Kagan’s Super 8 camera and set it to a soundtrack by two of Ms. Greif’s pals, the avant-garde musicians and downtown characters Arto Lindsay and Peter Scherer.
The commercial is grainy and mysterious — the Barneys logo doesn’t appear until the end — and the use of a Super 8 camera might have been a first for a TV ad.
“Neil saw that it would be cool, and it would blow people’s minds,” Ms. Greif said. “Which it did. He was a visionary at a visionary place. He had a great eye, and he was really open to doing things that were more artistic. He allowed people to do things.”
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The post Neil Kraft, Visionary Adman Who Sold ‘a Mood and a Lifestyle,’ Dies at 67 appeared first on New York Times.
