Menlook Builds a TV Ad Entirely From Instagram Flat-Lays
Menlook's #MyMenlook campaign, created by Paris-based agency Kindai and launched in France on April 13, 2016, is the first television advertisement assembled entirely from Instagram photos taken by globally recognised fashion influencers, transforming the platform's signature flat-lay aesthetic into a broadcast-ready film.
Menlook is a Paris-based men's lifestyle and e-commerce retailer with a digital-first proposition and a global audience reach. The brand entered 2016 with an established appetite for creative risk: as reported by Us Fashionnetwork, Menlook had acquired British premium menswear retailer Oki-Ni in May 2013, signalling an international expansion strategy that the #MyMenlook campaign would later echo in its use of globally sourced Instagram imagery. The campaign operates across two registers simultaneously. It is a broadcast piece — a fully produced television commercial aired in France — and a participatory social initiative anchored to the hashtag #MyMenlook, through which consumers were invited to submit their own Instagram flat-lay photographs for the chance to win a consumer competition prize of ten thousand euros.
In France, the campaign arrived at a moment when men's fashion e-commerce was accelerating, and Menlook was positioning itself as the authoritative destination for premium and contemporary menswear discovery online. The choice to source creative assets entirely from Instagram was not an accident of budget or convenience. It was a deliberate statement about where visual authority in fashion had migrated — away from studio shoots and toward the curated, object-oriented language of the flat-lay and knolling trend that had come to define aspirational fashion content on Instagram by 2016. The resulting film, containing a single media asset, distilled that visual language into a coherent television narrative, making #MyMenlook one of the more formally inventive fashion apparel campaigns produced in France that year.
Menlook's strategic rationale for #MyMenlook rested on a single, well-timed cultural observation. By April 2016, the Instagram flat-lay had evolved from a niche styling device into a dominant visual convention across men's fashion and lifestyle content, used extensively by both independent creators and established fashion publishers to present apparel, accessories, and objects in a composed, overhead arrangement that communicated taste without narrative complexity.
Kindai, the Paris agency behind the campaign, identified this convention not as a social media format to be imitated but as a creative raw material to be repurposed. As reported by Glossy Co, Alain Bretillot, Kindai's head of brand strategy, described the campaign's underlying logic as reversing the conventional media flow: rather than adapting television creative for Instagram, the team brought Instagram's visual language directly onto television. That inversion gave #MyMenlook a formal distinctiveness that standard fashion apparel campaigns produced in France in 2016 could not easily replicate.
The competitive context in France and across Europe sharpened the strategic case. Menlook was competing in the premium and contemporary menswear e-commerce space against international platforms with larger marketing budgets and broader brand recognition. According to Blog Lengow, men's fashion represented approximately nineteen percent of the European fashion market at the time, a segment attracting growing investment from both pure-play digital retailers and traditional fashion houses moving online. According to Mintel, the UK men's clothing market reached fourteen point one billion pounds in 2015, growing four point one percent year-over-year from thirteen point five billion pounds in 2014, illustrating the broader regional momentum Menlook sought to ride. By grounding its television creative in a genuinely popular Instagram trend, the brand aligned itself with the visual preferences of a digitally native male consumer already engaged with fashion content on the platform, reinforcing its positioning as a retailer that understood how modern men discover and engage with apparel.
Creative direction on #MyMenlook was led by Nicolas Lauffenburger, with Philippe Simon serving as art director and Alain Bretillot as copywriter, all operating within Kindai's Paris studio. The core creative challenge was translation: how to take a format native to a vertical, thumb-scrolled, individually viewed medium — the Instagram photo — and render it legible and visually compelling on a horizontal, shared, broadcast screen.
The solution was to commission flat-lay photography from a roster of globally recognised Instagramers whose work already embodied the aesthetic Menlook wanted to claim. As reported by joyana.fr, contributors included Will Taylor, founder of the influential interiors and style account Bright Bazaar, and Tareq Q, a Kuwait-based sneaker collector and streetwear enthusiast with a substantial following built around precisely composed object photography. The selection of influencers spanning different geographies — from France and the United Kingdom to Kuwait — reinforced Menlook's positioning as a retailer with international reach and cultural fluency, even as the campaign itself was anchored in France.
The flat-lay and knolling aesthetic chosen for the campaign was not simply decorative. As noted by glossy.co in its April 13, 2016 review, the format carried inherent credibility with the target consumer because it originated from the same visual environment where that consumer already discovered and evaluated fashion. The photographs were composed to hold menswear products at the centre of each frame — clothing, footwear, and accessories arranged with the deliberate precision characteristic of the most-shared Instagram fashion content of 2016. Assembling these individual images into a coherent television film required both editorial judgment and production discipline, ensuring that the aggregate piece read as a campaign rather than a slideshow. The consumer-facing hashtag #MyMenlook extended this aesthetic logic by inviting the audience to participate in the same flat-lay convention, blurring the boundary between brand content and user-generated contribution.
No verified performance data for the #MyMenlook campaign is publicly available in terms of television reach, hashtag volume, social engagement metrics, or e-commerce conversion impact. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 70 out of 100, reflecting strong formal innovation offset by the absence of measurable outcome data in the public record.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several properties associated with effective fashion apparel advertising. The decision to build a television advertisement from Instagram photos gave the campaign a verifiable claim to novelty — as reported by glossy.co, it was identified on its launch date of April 13, 2016 in France as the first TV ad made from influencer Instagram photos — which is the kind of differentiated narrative that earns editorial coverage and extends reach beyond paid media. The ten-thousand-euro consumer prize tied to the #MyMenlook hashtag created a participation mechanic with real incentive weight, increasing the likelihood of meaningful user-generated content volume rather than passive awareness.
According to blog.lengow.com, Menlook had accumulated more than five hundred thousand active customers by early 2017, suggesting that the brand's broader marketing activity across this period was sustaining meaningful commercial momentum. The campaign's geographic focus on France, where Menlook was headquartered and held its strongest brand equity, made the television placement strategically coherent rather than diffuse. The dual-channel structure — broadcast film plus participatory hashtag — reflects a campaign architecture designed to perform across both reach and engagement objectives, which remains a sound model for fashion e-commerce brands seeking to convert awareness into community.
The #MyMenlook campaign is a television advertisement launched by Menlook in France in April 2016. Created by agency Kindai, it is the first TV ad built entirely from Instagram flat-lay photos by fashion influencers. A consumer hashtag competition with a ten-thousand-euro prize extended the campaign onto Instagram.
Kindai, a Paris-based advertising agency, created the #MyMenlook campaign for Menlook. The creative team comprised Nicolas Lauffenburger as creative director, Philippe Simon as art director, and Alain Bretillot as copywriter, as reported by joyana.fr. The campaign launched in France on April 13, 2016.
The #MyMenlook campaign drew on the flat-lay and knolling trend. This Instagram convention involves arranging clothing, footwear, and accessories in precise overhead compositions. By 2016, the flat-lay had become a defining visual format in men's fashion content on Instagram, giving Menlook's television film immediate cultural recognition among its target audience.
The campaign featured globally recognised Instagramers including Will Taylor, founder of Bright Bazaar, and Tareq Q, a Kuwait-based sneaker collector and streetwear enthusiast, as reported by joyana.fr. Their flat-lay photography was adapted directly into the television film, lending the campaign authentic Instagram visual credibility.
The campaign targeted men's fashion and apparel consumers in France, where Menlook was headquartered. According to blog.lengow.com, men's fashion represented approximately nineteen percent of the European fashion market, a growing segment. Menlook's digital-first retail model and international influencer roster positioned it to reach premium menswear shoppers across France and broader European markets.
The Clapboard Score for the #MyMenlook campaign is 70 out of 100. The score recognises the campaign's genuine formal innovation — building a television advertisement from Instagram photos was a verifiable first — while reflecting the absence of publicly available performance metrics to confirm commercial or social impact in the French market.
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