TAITTINGER, Around the World in Eighty Days

Hop on the train with designer Florence Mauduech

This summer, the champagne Taittinger reinterprets a literary classic in a photographic campaign: Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Creative director Florence Mauduech takes us behind the scenes of this creation.

Around the World in Eighty Days is one of Jules Verne's most emblematic novels. Among the author's 62 Voyages Extraordinaires, it is the one that most directly echoes technological advances - which revolutionized transportation by reducing the time needed to cover long distances - and more specifically three immediately contemporary events: the opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt, the inauguration of the Fréjus tunnel and the completion of the railroad linking the East and West coasts of the United States. It's in reference to Phileas Fogg's railway journey that Taittinger is taking us to the four corners of the world this summer in its latest photographic campaign. Unlike the famous explorer's journey, however, there are no Sioux attacks on the horizon.

In the image of the Champagne house, the décor has been designed with refinement and efficiency by head decorator Florence Mauduech, who tells us all about the behind-the-scenes aspects of this summer campaign.

Teamwork

" It's a team effort. The customer and the photographic team draw up a creative brief and detail their intentions. Then I come in to study the budget, feasibility and finalize the writing with the photographer." In fact, the head set designer, usually called in to work on film sets, is involved by the photographers from the very first exchanges in preparation for the shoot. After several readings of the script, she proposed several set concepts. Although several universes were initially planned, the creative team settled on a timeless symbol of the art of travel: the train. " We designed only one large, more accomplished set, because it was in the train that we projected ourselves the most. " This is where the mastery of the head decorator comes in, to create the setting for this campaign. Once the artistic line has been defined, Florence Mauduech is responsible for its execution and implementation. To this end, she recruits and coordinates the foremen responsible for manufacturing the decor elements in the workshop. " Using our mood board as a starting point, we intelligently design each element in the workshop so that the lights and other photo stands can be integrated into it. " Every detail is thought through: the luggage rack, the shelf, the curtains. "Where we would normally have played on decorative strings and flirted with a more dreamlike universe, the choice was to stick to great realism, which in a train means using metal and lacquer, shiny materials not usually used in photography. This was an ambitious choice on the part of the photographers. The benches were the main constraint. We looked everywhere, almost all over France, but the benches were too old or too damaged... In the end, we decided to make them ourselves

Shooting

Finally, during the shooting, the set designer supervises the installation and removal of the sets. Her work concludes with accessorizing, a few elements of life that accompany the voyage: suitcases, telescopes, compasses, marine instruments. Through each detail, Florence Mauduech brings the photographers' vision to life, and together they play with the viewer's perception. " The universe of the set changes completely according to the set of props, the projected landscape, the change of actor...". Sometimes surreal, sometimes underwater, sometimes even unknown, it's an exhaustive world tour.

"It was quite ambitious for photography to do an entire set, but from such a set it's possible to produce a lot of photos," explains Florence Mauduech, who with this project gets off the beaten track. A chief decorator specializing in the world of luxury and beauty, she has designed sets for prestigious houses such as Yves Saint Laurent and Isabelle Marrant, as well as national brands such as Super U. " The train theme and this scale were therefore new to me, usually I would have designed the whole train and played with scale effects."

Ultimately, these narrative images take us on a journey alongside an almost personified bottle of Taittinger champagne, to parts unknown, but the important thing is never the destination.

Discover the Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs or Comtes de Champagne Rosé on the Pépites en Champagne website.