The Kendall Jenner Donna Karan campaign for Fall 2026 does something no campaign in the brand’s relaunched era has done before: it plants itself fully in New York, moving between pavements, car interiors and the kind of low-lit urban geometry that was always native to the label’s original register. Jenner is photographed by Mert Alas, with styling by Jessica Diehl, and the results have been circulating through fashion forums with the particular energy that attaches to a campaign that, for once, seems to be doing exactly what it set out to do.
The Kendall Jenner Donna Karan campaign and the return to New York
Since the brand’s relaunch from Spring 2024, Donna Karan has pursued a strategy that is legible enough to read as deliberate: a rotating cast of women who carry cultural weight accumulated across decades rather than algorithms. Christy Turlington, Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer and Adriana Lima have all fronted campaigns in the seasons since. Each choice has announced, with some insistence, that this is a brand that knows where it came from. Jenner, arriving as the face of Fall 2026, represents a slight but coherent pivot: the same message, delivered through a different generation.
What distinguishes this campaign from its predecessors, according to Yahoo Entertainment, is that it is the first since the relaunch to be shot entirely across New York, with Jenner moving between city streets and the back seats of cars. The wardrobe leans heavily into the brand’s late-1980s and 1990s codes, which is where Donna Karan’s visual vocabulary has always been most persuasive: the idea of a woman in transit through a city that asks something of her, dressed accordingly.
Among the strongest images is one in which Jenner wears a black-cherry velvet suit, a piece that sits at the intersection of the archival and the current in the way that the best campaign garments tend to. Elsewhere, she wears Donna Karan’s archival bodysuit, reworked for Fall 2026 with an extra-wide belt. Accessories include the Black Cherry Leno bag, the Cashmere Tote in Chocolate Suede, sculptural gold jewellery and eyewear, a set of objects that functions less as product placement than as a kind of vocabulary lesson in what the brand’s version of urban dressing actually means.
Forum response: on brand and, mostly, on model
The campaign’s reception on theFashionSpot has been telling in the way that forum responses often are: not unanimous, but weighted towards something like qualified approval. The qualifications are themselves instructive. ‘I have never minded Kendall, even if her modelling skills are extremely average,’ wrote forum member WAVES. ‘However, she can look so chic and beautiful, but also so mundane. Not impressed by any of this, but she looks good, and the campaign fits the brand.’ The separation of model from campaign (acknowledging that one works even when the other underwhelms) is a reasonably sophisticated critical position for a comment thread.
Not everyone found the execution seamless. ‘That backseat shot with the golden belt buckle is totally distorted, though; I can’t fathom how they let that pass,’ noted Toni Ahlgren, identifying a specific technical failure in an otherwise polished body of work. The observation is worth pausing on: the backseat is one of the campaign’s central visual motifs, a woman in a car as both subject and spectacle, which makes a distortion in that particular frame a more consequential oversight than it might otherwise be.
The stronger responses converged on the combination of photographer, model and setting as genuinely productive. ‘I like this, and have always thought Kendall has photographed well for Mert Alas,’ wrote vogue28. ‘The images are strong and perfectly on-brand for Donna Karan. I like New York as the backdrop. The car, the styling, the rich shade of burgundy… it’s ALL working!’ MModa was more direct: ‘Stunning! I am not a Kendall Jenner fan, but she looks so good in the campaign. The fashion/beauty styling and photography are perfect.’
What the forum collectively identifies, across its disagreements, is that the Kendall Jenner Donna Karan campaign for Fall 2026 succeeds primarily as an act of location-casting. New York is not a backdrop here but a protagonist, and the brand’s late-twentieth-century grammar of movement, fabric and hardware reads most clearly when it is set against the city that produced it. Whether the backseat distortion was a technical failure or, as one might uncharitably suggest, a reminder that even chic campaigns are made under pressure, the images that do land carry the weight the season requires.
