We wanted to use the environment and create a world in the environments that are accessible in Florida, like the swamp. For me, it’s always about storytelling. So Ryan and I started sending each other all these pictures of these guys doing construction, fishing, or wrestling with gators. We felt that Travis’s physique, and also his personality, could handle all that.
Right, it can be challenging to style athletes who don’t typically fit into standard-issue fashion samples. But in this case, you used his physique as an advantage. There’s a lot of bare chest in this shoot.
We wanted to make sure that the fashion could accentuate his physicality, not the other way around. Usually when you’re dressing a model, or even someone who is average size, somebody who is not in the NFL, it’s more about the fashion. But this time we had to go and reverse it and make it about the physicality and accentuating the physicality and making that just as important to the story.
There’s a lot to unpack from the shoot, but let’s start with the cover where he’s on the flyboard in the boxers and the Prada vest. How did that image come together?
It was really hard to figure out how to make it happen, because at first we thought he had to have a life vest on. So we reached out to a couple of people to see if they could make us a life vest that could be fashion. He ended up not having to wear one, but once I started diving in I thought the Prada vest would be really cool. And we wanted the cover to feel like something that we just hadn’t seen before. And I mean, he’s a fucking athlete. I think he trained for 15 minutes and then he just got up and started doing this shit. It was kind of incredible. Again, everything was about his physicality and what he can do as an athlete. A lot of it was riding on him and we were kind of just there to see the action.
Travis famously doesn’t work with a stylist and does a lot of shopping for himself. What was his role in the styling process?
He was so fun. He was like, I don’t care. I’ll do that. And you know, over the last few years we’ve seen this influx of athletes wanting to be more involved in fashion and the tunnel walks have become iconic, so I was expecting him to have an opinion, and he was just so down to experiment. And you also have to think, this was right after those pictures came out of him and people were talking about how he wasn’t in the best shape. And I think shooting him a little bit more raw and showing the body that he’s in is almost like a fuck-you to the critics, which I thought was really, really, really powerful.
Do you follow football?
I understand football, but what I understand more than the sport is pop culture. So I let that be the guide.
So how did the swamp scene go down? There’s an image of Travis holding an alligator, but were there actual gators in the swamp that you had to watch out for?
Abso-fuckin’-lutely. We were at Mack’s Fish Camp, which is run by these two guys, and the property has been in their family for five generations. So they know the animals and they know exactly what to do and what not to do. They were jumping in the water with the alligators. And they had a wild fucking pig running around.
What was the deal with the pig?
It was their pet pig! And they brought that alligator from inside the house. That was their pet.
Oh, wow. I assumed we rented the gator for the shoot.
No, no. They owned it. So you got this pig with horns running around, and you got these alligators kind of looking at the pig waiting for their moment.
I assume you didn’t get in the swamp, but I noticed one of your Hermès bags did get in the swamp with Travis. Tell me about that shot.
I keep laughing because you keep taking me back to the day. So when we had the fitting, I thought we needed a juxtaposition between this really French and really high end and really luxury object with something that is, you know, the polar opposite. I thought bringing those worlds together would create an amazing picture. I wanted to shoot it so bad, I flew my assistant in from LA with that bag. And it’s also the Hermès HAC 60, which is the biggest version of the bag, and also super rare. And I thought him holding that bag with his frame was just… And when we were shooting it? It was magical.
