Cut Video's wildly popular "100 Years Of Beauty" series is often praised for its ability to capture a century's worth of trends in just a couple of minutes.
The latest installment follows 100 years of German beauty, and it's no exception. As Cut's creative director Mike Gaston told The Huffington Post, however, the short-but-sweet clip we see just one small aspect of the huge amount of work they do for each shoot.
"People don't see the amount of research that goes into developing a piece like this," he said. "We'll put together a giant document contextualizing everything against a thesis, but what people actually see is a small fraction of the effort that goes into producing one of these videos."
That notion rings especially true for this video, which begins in 1910. But starting in 1950, the screen splits to represent both East and West Germany. While the two sides show similarities (both prefer a variation of a ponytail in the 1960s, for example), the images demonstrate the effect the political divide had on both culture and beauty.
Fittingly, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, beauty trends were unified again. It was the political aspect that Gaston says made this installment one of the more complicated to make.
"The hardest part of doing a series like this is achieving authenticity. How can we be certain our work will be true to the experience of the people who identify with these cultures? How do we negotiate the complications and horrors in their histories in a way that is honest but still accessible?" he said, addressing this video specifically: "How do we acknowledge something like Nazi Germany without being reductive? Although I'm satisfied overall by our latest video, I'm not sure we were as successful confronting that period as we could've been."
Head to Cut Video to see more.
