The Barry Jenkins Prada campaign is the most discussed commission of the AW26 season, and it is not difficult to see why: it represents the first time the director has turned his attention to fashion, a medium whose grammar is, in most respects, the opposite of his own. Where Jenkins builds feeling across time, in sustained close-ups and earned narrative arcs, a campaign has perhaps thirty seconds and a still image to do something similar. That he accepted the brief at all is the news; what he did with it is worth examining.
The campaign covers both the men’s and women’s collections designed by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and stars Hunter Schafer. Jenkins, whose film Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, has also directed If Beale Street Could Talk and The Underground Railroad, a body of work marked throughout by a particular quality of attention to the human face. That quality translates, it turns out. Fashion campaigns have long recruited from the art world and occasionally from music video; the move toward long-form directors is newer, and the Prada commission makes the case for it more persuasively than most.
A director between projects, and between media
Context matters here. According to WWD, Jenkins is currently working on two films: one with Zendaya about the life of Ronnie Spector, and another about the life of choreographer Alvin Ailey. The Prada campaign, then, sits in a particularly charged interval in his career, between two projects that are themselves preoccupied with performance, embodiment and the spectacle of a life lived in public. The choice of subject is not incidental. Schafer, like Spector and Ailey, is someone whose public image has become inseparable from the way they move through the world. Jenkins shooting them for Prada is less a departure than a lateral move, a different surface for the same set of questions.
The campaign is also, in a quieter way, a statement about what Prada (under the continuing creative co-direction of Miuccia Prada and Simons) understands a fashion image to be for. Not, or not only, to sell garments, but to function as a frame: a way of making visible something that clothes, on their own, can only gesture toward.
The Barry Jenkins Prada campaign in a crowded season
Around it, the rest of the AW26 campaign landscape has been doing its own negotiating between prestige and pleasure. At Saint Laurent, Connor Storrie’s appearance (winking to camera while Milli Vanilli’s ‘Girl I’m Gonna Miss You’ plays) under Anthony Vaccarello’s direction via photographer Talia Chetrit, had the particular quality of a campaign that knows exactly how much it is not taking itself seriously. The 80s power ballad as soundtrack is a choice that reads as both affectionate and slightly arch, which is, arguably, the Saint Laurent register at its most effective.
Steven Meisel returned to shoot Versace’s AW26 campaign, a commission freighted with the knowledge that Pieter Mulier’s arrival at the house is imminent. Meisel photographing Versace in this particular transitional moment has the character of a document as much as an advertisement, a recording of where the house stands before it is asked to stand somewhere else. Inez and Vinoodh, meanwhile, brought Raquel Zimmermann to a coastal setting for Chloé, a campaign that leans into the house’s longstanding fluency with natural light and unhurried femininity.
Elsewhere: Teyana Taylor for Alaïa by David Sims; Anok Yai for Ferragamo by Johnny Dufort; Paloma Elsesser for McQueen by Glen Luchford; Hailey Bieber for Miu Miu by Zoë Ghertner; Rosemary Ferguson for Burberry by Vitali Gelwich; Fendi by Jo Ann Callis; Vivienne Westwood by Juergen Teller; Carhartt WIP by Pablo Escudero. Each of these is a set of decisions, a conversation between a house and a photographer about what a season is supposed to feel like. The Barry Jenkins Prada campaign simply asks the question at greater depth, and with a director whose next two projects will be watched closely enough that anything he makes in the meantime carries weight.
