CREATIVE DIRECTION | PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
3sixteen x Blue Owl
“Gold Rush”
Photography & Video: Alec Campbell
Model: Alex Fernando
I had always pictured a campaign for this product centered around someone panning for gold. I didn’t know the first thing about gold panning, so Alec and I researched the process and the history of it as we built out our mood board. I wanted to find a relatively shallow river, surrounded by rocks or foliage, which wasn’t hard to do in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up camping in the Skykomish region off US-2 and knew the river would be relatively shallow in September. Plus, you have to drive through a town named Gold Bar with a killer drive-in burger place (shout out Zeke’s), so it seemed like the location was practically meant to be.
I’ve always loved the image of someone fully-clothed standing in water. The contrast has always felt impactful to me, and in this case, made perfect sense considering the washed nature of the jeans and jacket. We waded out to an area with a beautiful rustic bridge and tons of perfectly-colored late Summer trees, which gave the images an incredible green-yellow tone that I felt paired perfectly against the dark indigo of the denim suit. I especially love how lived-in the jacket and jeans look. To me, it feels like he’s been out there plenty of times before even if that was the first and only time any of us had “panned for gold.”
I paired the on-location images with clean unobstructed studio photographs that were able to further showcase the minute details of the denim. This was also a nod to the photography from the original installment in the Gold Rush series roughly a year prior.
The campaign was used throughout Blue Owl’s website, social media, and email marketing. The 3sixteen x Blue Owl “Gold Rush” Selvedge Denim was one of Blue Owl’s best-selling items for the year.
Gold Rush was a collaboration between 3sixteen and Seattle-based online retailer Blue Owl.
Throughout their 20-year history, 3sixteen has transformed from a label that primarily made graphic t-shirts, into a contemporary menswear giant that is widely credited with popularizing American-made raw denim. Despite over a decade of partnership, 3sixteen and Blue Owl had yet to release any collaborative denim projects until the birth of the Gold Rush Series.
For this project, I served as the lead Creative Director. I was also the main point of contact for the project’s product development, where I worked directly with 3sixteen co-founders Andrew Chen and Johan Lam to conceptualize and sample the Gold Rush jeans.
In the early stages of ideation for what a 3sixteen x Blue Owl denim would look like, one of the key details I knew I wanted to incorporate was the double selvedge line of 3sixteen’s Kibata Series denim. It was fitting, considering the jeans were to be offered fully rinsed (as opposed to raw), which at the time was a hallmark of the Kibata Denim. When discussing what detail would make the jeans stand out, I presented the idea of using a gold lamé thread for the double selvedge line, and I was immediately reminded of 3sixteen’s original pickaxe logo, which birthed the “gold rush” name.
