Fantasy, Intimacy, and Girls on Cars: Unpacking the Mystique of Realisation Par
A case study of the power of distinctive imagery
One of the absolute worst things about how we live now is the slow erosion of fantasy.
Let me explain what I mean.
Our fantasies point us somewhere. They offer direction from deep in our subconscious. Most of the time, it is good not to take them literally. They’re mostly too grandiose or impractical to be achievable. But the daydreams and fantasies that come to us from within tell us about our deepest desires. You can’t do anything significant in life without dreaming about it first. I’m in marketing (someone has to be). It’s my job to understand this. And I think my industry, in the Algorithm and AI Apocalypse, has largely forgotten the power of fantasy, and instead is laser focused on mere attention.
When we replace fantasy with streams of content created by others, we lose vital information about ourselves. It is very dangerous to let someone else craft all your fantasies for you, whatever else the advertisers, producers, adult film stars, and screenwriters want you to believe.
Good branding is about sparking fantasy. Giving people something to daydream about. Your prospect’s imagination is infinitely more valuable than their attention alone.
Which brings us to Realisation Par.
Realisation Par, if you don’t know, is a DTC fashion brand founded by two Australian women, Alexandra Spencer and Teale Talbot. They specialize in silk dresses, though the line has expanded to include knitwear, graphic tees, and accessories. Realisation Par is very good at getting customers to fantasize. In fact, they might be one of the best within their category.
You might be wondering how I could possibly know that, since fantasies are not KPIs like impressions, views, clicks, and so on. We can’t measure or observe them, and they’re private to each person. Google Ad Services can’t charge us for the creation of or exposure to them.
But I know that Realisation Par products play a starring role in most of my fantasies of my ideal daily life, and have done for many years. I am constantly imagining my life wearing their clothing. There is no other brand with so much influence on the little subconscious gremlin that lives in my brain, pounding away on my psychic piano. Given the brand’s runaway success, Instagram following (735k), and social proof (thousands and thousands of tagged photos), I know I’m not alone.
I’ve been a fan of Realisation Par almost since they launched, first discovering them sometime in 2016. I don’t remember how I learned about the brand, but I remember going to their website for the first time and looking at product photos. The product line back then consisted of two wrap dresses with ruffled trim, a couple of similar ruffled-sleeve blouses, and a longer, royal blue slip dress embroidered with the golden symbols of the Zodiac. There were a few other things, but it couldn’t have been more than sixteen products total.
They were all feminine designs with vintage-inspired silhouettes. Back then, the website was kind of janky–the pictures took a while to load and the Times New Roman font looked a little amateurish. But none of that mattered, because the product photos told a different, more sophisticated story.
As a DTC e-commerce brand, Realisation Par can’t rely on the customer feeling the fabric or trying on the clothes in order to get them to convert. They have to win the customer over through imagery, design, and product information. (And through social proof, but Realisation has never incorporated reviews on their website, something that’s obviously deliberate, given how powerfully persuasive reviews are. They instead rely on user-generated content on Instagram, as far as I can tell. It’s a somewhat unusual strategy in DTC.) In the intervening years, RP’s website has been redesigned. Now it’s much easier to navigate, and fits with the brand’s more premium pricing. They’ve added more information about the fabrics they use and the fit of each style. But one thing that’s never changed is the distinctive beauty and glamour of their imagery.
When I first looked at the website, I was struck by the casual, tossed-off, unguarded quality the product photos had. In particular, I remember one photo taken outside in a California backyard. (You can always tell when it’s California sunlight. The golden radiance created by the city’s smog can’t be faked or replicated anywhere else.)
The model is wearing the Christy dress in Wild Cherry–a raw silk navy cocktail dress, flirtatiously short in length, with scarlet red cherries printed on it. But her hair is wet and wrapped up in a white bath towel. She looks like she’s getting ready to throw a party and has gone to pluck some lemons from a tree for whiskey sours. (I can’t find this photo on the internet, otherwise I’d share it here.)
Another photo showed Devon Lee Carlson, a willowy, dark-haired dancer-turned-influencer, larking around on the desert landmark Salvation Mountain. If you’ve never heard of it before, Salvation Mountain is an unhinged, handmade, brightly painted, adobe-and-car tire hillside monument to Jesus. Devon does an arabesque in her pansy-printed silk blouse and plaid pants, resting her Doc Marten shoe on an old car tire and looking back at the camera like she just now realized you were there. These images seemed full of energy, mystery, and a kind of freedom that I couldn’t name–but instantly longed for. It gave me a kind of vertigo.
I had never wanted to buy something so badly, so quickly–even though it would take a couple of years before I could afford to do so. I have since become a fanatically devoted customer. I didn’t even realize how loyal I’d become until I looked at my closet one day in November of 2023. All of the dresses I own, except one, are from Realisation. I can’t imagine buying a dress from any other company–even though I have nowhere near the same brand loyalty for any other clothing category. I’ll buy blue jeans from any company that will just give me a 32 inch inseam, for the love of God, but for dresses and skirts, my loyalty to Realisation is unyielding. And really, in this day and age? Brand loyalty itself is vanishingly rare.
So what was going on when I first looked at those images? And why do I still have the dopamine response of a cocaine-addled lab rat whenever I see the company’s webpage, eight years on?
Realisation Par: The Brand Architecture
It’s ironic that RP has been so successful in the Influencer Age. They gift dresses to influencers just like every other brand of their kind, but that’s not quite what I mean. Instead I’m referring to the dominant visual style of the Influencer in her first iteration. For most of the 2010s, Instagram had a tightly choreographed, posed, deeply artificial aesthetic. We all know what it looks like: not even a single eyebrow hair out of place, every wine glass or vase of flowers arranged just so. FaceTuned, airbrushed, highlighted, tweaked, snatched, polished up and hyperreal.
This aesthetic fetishized wealth, but tacky, new money, self-conscious wealth with a thirst to prove itself. A hysterical pursuit of anodyne perfection, the Instagram aesthetic was a reaction to the increasing uncertainty of our world. In the midst of all of that, Realisation’s own aesthetic cut through the fog like a lighthouse–at least to me.
There was often a touch of the surreal or the silly about their images, like one from their 2017 winter collection with a model holding a mylar dolphin balloon in a long-sleeved black dress on the North Shore beach at sunset. It’s a goofy photo, since her face and body language is serious and removed, holding her exuberant little balloon. The black of her dress is immediately focus-pulling and incongruous with the Titian blue of the sea and the cotton candy sky. But the picture made me imagine what it would be like to be on vacation with my friends on the North Shore. In another distinctive image, Devon Lee Carlson is standing on the roof of a vintage car (I would guess one from the 1970s) in her mini dress and cowboy boots, somewhere in the Mojave desert. The sun is blaring down, and her eyes are squinting, and she’s projecting both confidence and a daring kind of playfulness. In 2018, no other brand that I came across in this category had such a distinctive aesthetic.
Scroll through the carousel to see Mojave Desert Car Dev in action.
Aside from the occasional red lip, Realisation models (dubbed Dreamgirls) never wear obvious makeup, nor do they have manicured, hairsprayed hairstyles. They tend to look as natural as possible. The products are styled with vintage or one-of-a-kind accessories–and in a sea of fast-fashion conformity and trend-chasing, that helps you notice the image in your feed. Lastly, and most abstractly, the images often have a timeless quality to them, by which I mean they’re difficult to place, unfettered in time, not from a specific era. Like the TS Eliot poem:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
The Realisation Par Dreamgirl looks like she’s always about to step into that rose garden.
Realisation now has product photos and Instagram photos with a slightly more traditional look–models posed against a blank-ish background, looking nonchalantly pretty. But the improvisational, casual feeling is still core to the brand aesthetic. In a November 2023 interview for Australian Vogue, co-founder Teale Talbot says, “we always wanted to be able to create a feeling through the imagery at Realisation and ultimately represent the authenticity of ourselves through the photo. The iconic look and feel of Real was a snapshot of the intimacy between Al and the Dreamgirl, and that’s what people really connect to. We started by shooting friends in Al’s backyard. Her ability to capture a moment of a friend feeling confident and sexy wearing a dress designed often with this friend in mind, was a formula that we seem to have nurtured and ultimately created the iconic Realisation look.”
What Talbot revealed in that quote is, in my estimation, one of the brand’s core values: intimacy. Intimacy defines how the brand looks. It’s what makes them stand out. It isn’t simply about pictures of beautiful women–it’s pictures of those women feeling beautiful and confident. An invitation to be known.
A lot of brands probably try to do this, but few of them succeed like Realisation. Because that feeling of intimacy is something you can’t fake.
Intimacy at Every Touchpoint
This brand value of intimacy is even part of how the products are packaged: the tag for each RP product features a tarot card, The Lovers, on the reverse. Their customer service email is the flirtatious talktomebaby@realisationpar.com. They call their muses and customers Dreamgirls. And the products themselves also manifest this intimate, romantic quality.
When I put on any of my Realisation dresses, I’m enveloped in that feeling of being seen, known, and admired. This is because the dresses are clearly designed by women, for women. Every silhouette they make is designed to sit close to the body–there is nothing oversized or androgynous about their skirts, dresses, and silk tops. They are un-apologetically feminine. Most dresses are bias-cut or feature bias-cut skirts. Bias cut silk glides over the body—it doesn’t cling. Seams and darts are thoughtfully placed; and the waist seam somehow happens to align perfectly with the actual smallest part of my midsection–always. Many of their designs are short and flirtatious, but a lot of them are more demure, midi-length and bra-friendly. So you can wear them to the office, and I sometimes do.
Their dresses are 100% silk, whether crepe de chine, silk georgette, or silk chiffon. This makes them feel so much more special to wear than dresses at similar price points rendered in fabrics like rayon or polyester. But their silk fabrics are also always woven instead of knitted. This means they have more inherent structure than a knitted dress. They can “give” a little bit, but they aren’t stretchy. Overall, this ends up being much more flattering, and it gives the clothes a kind of je ne sais quoi. They look different from other dresses in the category because the fabric is made with a warp and a weft, not on a knit machine. It’s therefore a different texture, often with a softly glowing luster. I’m not sure if it makes the prints on their silk look better, but I imagine it does.
Anyway, all of these features combined means that a Realisation dress ends up looking very different from most other dresses available at the same price point. It’s differentiation that’s actually meaningful. It’s also an extension of their core value (intimacy) and brand archetype (The Lover). Every design detail demonstrates real knowledge of how young women want to look and feel. That’s intimacy in action.
But back to my original point about fantasy. The reason why Realisation Par’s aesthetic works so well to activate the customer’s fantasy is that there is something about it that feels achievable and yet idealized at once. That intersection is where glamour lives.
RP is selling you a dream where intimacy is effortlessness. And where intimacy is always exciting, freeing, and beautiful. There are no tricky parts, nothing embarrassing or exposing, just the sublime high of being known with none of the downsides.
The effortlessness is, perhaps, the ultimate fantasy for women my age in a time of unrelenting optimization.
Intimacy and Effort in the Optimization Age
Now more than ever, as a woman, I feel poked and prodded to be always optimizing everything about myself: the fine lines around my eyes, the fullness of my thighs, my time management skills, my unbridled hair, my spending and saving habits, the food I eat, the things I do at work, the way I handle male suitors…
All of them should be improved, smoothed, regimented, project-managed, cleansed, controlled, standardized, whittled down–at a pace, or using methods, that far outstrip any natural evolution. My birthright in this culture—one of my birthrights, anyway—is to expend a ton of effort in order to make myself desirable and worthy of intimacy. It’s virtually never occurred to me that I could be worthy of it just as I am.
Instead, I’m supposed to be changing as much about myself as humanly possible, especially any quality deemed “feminine” in a way that is unruly or disruptive. I’m not supposed to lie around leafing through magazines on Saturday afternoon. I could be monetizing a hobby! I’m not supposed to have whims or emotions, unless they compel me to buy something or jump on a treadmill. I’m supposed to spend my money on investments, not a bouquet of fresh flowers or an antique book with beautiful hand-marbled end paper. My body’s only supposed to be soft in extremely prescribed places, and everywhere else as hard, cold, and aerodynamic as a porpoise. If, by some strange miracle, my unruly, stretch-marked, knee-surgeried body effects the people around me, I’m also held responsible for all the ways that it triggers, arouses, or threatens them. It doesn’t matter if that effect is involuntary or unwitting.
I’ve spent most of my life complying with the “supposed tos” and the “shoulds”. It’s left me, at age 31, with many neuroses, which you can probably tell from the above paragraph.
Realisation Par operates within this paradigm to a degree. Their sizing essentially stops at a US 14. So by no means are they subverting this status quo in a way that’s meaningful—and in fact their size range continues to implicitly reinforce ideas about beauty and thinness that I would normally rail against. As I’ve said before and will say again, glamour is an illusion. It isn’t real.
And yet, the fantasy compels me. For whatever reason, I put on a Realisation dress and I feel more like myself—my real self—than in any other outfit. I am, at my core, feminine, and romantic, and a little impractical and more concerned with beauty than any other value. That’s how those dresses are—those are the qualities they project.
But the fantasy also compels me because it tells a different story than the one offered by optimization culture–one where the vibrant, creative, beautiful life you want to live isn’t dependent on changing yourself. The story goes something like this:
What if you are prettier than you realize, in your red dress in your sunlit backyard, standing on tiptoe to pluck a lemon from a tree? What if your beauty came, not from a personal trainer or the injector’s needle, but instead from your charisma, or that certain softness around your eyes that’s only visible when you think no one’s watching you? What if you already have it, the thing you want, and all you need to tap into that feeling is to be seen and admired by a friend, or a lover, who really knows you?
That is what Realisation is selling, not dresses. And that is why I’m loyal to them.
If you made it to the end, you are my hero. Tell me: is there a brand you’re deeply loyal to? What is it about them that you find so irresistible?