Moody backdrop

THE only thing a visitor to the small Italian fishing village of Portofino on the Ligurian coast doesn't need to pack is a watch.

Portofino shoot

IT'S entirely conceivable that the only thing a visitor to the small Italian fishing village of Portofino on the Ligurian coast doesn't need to pack is a watch.

Fishing became secondary to tourism since the jet-set of the 1950s and ’60s – Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn and the like – made this sleepy town their playground. Keeping time is not really the point here. For the Swiss watchmaker IWC, however, it was the perfect place to showcase a collection of watches. In fact, it was the only place.

IWC’s Portofino collection was  introduced in 1984 and was inspired by and named after the glamorous but casual lifestyle typified by Portofino in its heyday. “In the end it was also about emotion and so we had to place the watch in context, somewhere fascinating and a place where movie stars would go,” says Edwin de Vries, brand manager for IWC in Australia.

Earlier this year, IWC invited some of what it refers to as its “friends of the brand”, who include Cate Blanchett, Kevin Spacey, Eric Dane, Jean Reno, Ronan Keating, Hiroyuki Sanada and Elle Macpherson, to Portofino to be shot by legendary German-born photographer Peter Lindbergh. A selection of his photographs, exclusive to WISH, are featured on these pages and depict a make-believe movie set of the sort it could be imagined Elizabeth Taylor and co might have starred in.

“For me, Portofino was a postcard,” says Lindbergh in the introduction to the book of images published by IWC. “A picture with coloured houses and fishing boats rocking on a shimmering sea ... the backdrop for a film already shot.”

And for Blanchett, slipping into the mood of la dolce vita was effortless. “How would Elizabeth Taylor eat this ice cream? How would Ava Gardner glide across this piazza? And how would Ingrid Bergman pick up this glass of champagne? Endless fun pretending,” she says of the three-day shoot.

Strictly speaking, IWC doesn’t make women’s watches but, increasingly, women are wearing them. In part because of the trend for bigger watches and in part because of the brand’s craftsmanship and design innovation. “More and more, we are finding that women are wearing our watches. It’s quite a provocative statement,” says de Vries.

Tennis champion Boris Becker dances in a tuxedo on the tennis court of the Splendido Hotel, Matthew Fox is pushed into the hotel’s pool fully clothed, the cast tries to pile into a Fiat, and then there’s the  zipping around the harbour in a Riva boat – endless fun, indeed. It’s almost possible to forget that this whole enterprise is about marketing a watch. And, yes, you can see the watch in nearly every shot, but it’s almost as though the timepiece is a minor actor in this film. This is even more surprising when you consider this is one of the biggest promotional activities IWC has undertaken.  “We’re a relatively small brand and this is one of the biggest exercises we’ve done,” confirms de Vries. “Just to get all those friends into one place at the same time was a massive deal.”

As for Lindbergh, he says: “This was the sort of shoot I became a photographer for; the sort of shoot I dreamed of as a teenager.”

The full portfolio of Peter Lindbergh’s Portofino can be viewed online at iwc.com