About

...It is not difficult to imagine my lungs filled with virgin air, young morning moisture glancing off of my goosebumps before warming up and coming of age in the afternoon.
My arms tingle, hairs bristle as I place myself in her shoes, brace my rock-solid core and ascend the north face of a contending boulder...

Into: confronts the contrast between porridge-colored routines of the day-to-day and the world beyond streets, and roadblocks, and half-heartedness. It is an address of the functional object's relationship to lifestyle as portrayed by commercial advertising for outdoor companies such as REI, Marmot, and Patagonia, etc. Creating the imagery to entice an audience towards these lifestyle objects is a brand marketer's pipe dream; it presents such a bankable design challenge, does it not? Is the ideal of spirituality so common, so ubiquitous, that the chimera of total serenity can be crafted into an image of an utterly attainable circumstance worth buying into?

Perhaps, the dynamic between the aesthetic enterprise - teams dedicated to convincing the consumption of an object beyond its function - and the actual consumers of lifestyle and its manufactured goods maintain fitness because the accession of experience in "Nature" is just as remunerative as the product itself. A compelling brand is not a sham if the lucrative benefits are mutual and balanced between purveyor and consumer, at least in the eye of the beholder. A highly desirable lifestyle is emphatically suggested in an atmosphere of action, self-preservation, and the camraderie of the object. The supposed advantages of these seductive functional products extend beyond the promise of good fortune, or mere contentment, or lack of personal tragedy and setback. The offer to combat ennui is aimed just as fully towards the listless deskworker as it is to those who have already chosen the road less traveled. The gratification is self-fulfilling; the images we continually shape ourselves after (and eventually into) is adamant confirmation that through this type of consumption we are very, very close to achieving the ideal.

-Rebecca Peel