Los Angeles-based photographer and filmmaker Autumn de Wilde‘s latest fantasyland, The Postman Dreams, a series of five short films incorporating Prada‘s Galleria bag, is an adorable creative lark launched days before the region’s artists and musicians decamp to the desert for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The films depict lovers on a staircase, a child staging an invasion with plastic soldiers, a magical fruit tree, a candy-colored laundromat, and a postman napping on the job. The Galleria bag, originally launched in 2007 in leather, crocodile, and ostrich, makes a cameo as an object of desire in each film (a child even slices it open to install a diorama of a battlefield for his toy tanks and paratroopers). Throughout the series, the Los Angeles-based band called The Blasting Company, founded by brothers Justin and Josh Petrojvic, plays catchy tunes inspired by what it calls nouveau-gypsey music.

De Wilde’s admiration for the physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton informs her films, and the music’s Balkan influence gives each short an exotic old-world feel. And yet the retro Los Angeles locations where each was filmed also seem very modern. Perhaps the Galleria bag bridges the gap. The project is a creative and imaginative way to merge fashion with music and art—a subtlety seldom achieved but often attempted during the desert festival. Watch and learn.

By Elizabeth Varnell

 

Pictured: A still from The Postman Dreams, a series of five short films by Autumn de Wilde commissioned by Prada.
Photo courtesy of Prada.

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