Lindsay Lohan may be in court-ordered rehab, but tonight she’ll make her first post-jail appearance — as a digital hologram, anyway — at Milk Studios, when Marc Ecko “unveils her” as the muse for his Cut & Sew line. Before heading into the slammer, Lohan shot four film-noir-inspired skits with photography team Markus Klinko and Indrani, stars of the Bravo reality series Double Exposure. (Indrani is also rumored to have had an intense, possibly romantic relationship with Lohan, naturally.) Klinko and Indrani filmed Lohan using high-def cameras and “augmented reality” technology. All of Ecko’s advertisements will contain a glyph that, when held up to a webcam, projects a hologram of a digital Lohan dressed in vintage costumes and, presciently, horizontally striped leggings.
The glyph will be available for free download on a dedicated website starting tomorrow, and will also be featured in Ecko’s September advertisements and marketing materials. Once the glyph is activated, Lohan’s stylized film noir world blends with the user’s, and they can move digital Lohan around, or make her express emotions of their choosing. She even talks!
“Originally, the concept was pretty simple, but then we had a fifteen-page script that appeared at the last minute, and she was able to work with that,” says Indrani. Adds Klinko, “She came in and learned her lines in five minutes, and then she really went beyond the lines and improvised. She showed huge emotional range. It was impressive and moving to watch.”
Ecko says that the push for Cut & Sew is part of the refocusing he’s had to do after some recent financial troubles. “Every time you fall, you get up, you dust yourself off, and you go back to business,” he says. “We went through some down patches, but our numbers are up double digits.” He hasn’t spoken to Lohan since the shoot a few months ago, but doesn’t have any regrets about casting her. “I was looking for that right tension of someone who could stir up people’s feelings, for better or worse, and also be a proper bombshell, a Raquel Welch throwback, and Lindsay does all that,” he says. “I know that people want to rag on her for being human and making mistakes. She’s done her crime, she did her time. She’s not the first professional to do that. I’m not casting aspersions.”
Ecko, who has a minor fascination with psychology, had her act out all the emotions in Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. “We had her go through annoyance, terror, love, acceptance, joy, submission. I left that night after the shoot thinking she has real chops. And contrary to popular opinion about her professionalism, she did three days of work in sixteen hours.” The narrative, he explains, involves Lohan acting as a bandit who helps the viewer “steal time,” hence the ski mask. “It’s a very indulgent ad campaign for me; she’s acting out my fantasies,” he says. “The second fantasy that men have besides having sex with multiple women at once is going on a bank heist with a woman, who is preferably hot. And the hologram idea came from my fantasies about Princess Leia, when R2-D2 does that projection of her. I basically lost my mind for four months conceptualizing this thing, but I think it turned out pretty great.”
Related: Watch the video teaser!
