The Ami Paris AW26 campaign does something that sounds almost too obvious to pull off: it takes the brand’s name literally. ‘Ami’ is French for friend, and so Ami Paris founder Alexandre Mattiussi has filled his autumn/winter 2026 images with people who are, in fact, his friends.
Photographed by Karim Sadli, the campaign features eight figures who have all walked for the brand previously: Rebecca Leigh, Saskia De Brauw, George Anderson, Jia Jingwen, Dara Gueye, Mack Karpes, Elliot Belot and Mohamed Benhadda. The premise is that they are caught almost off-guard, in what the brand describes as a spontaneous manner. Whether or not spontaneity can survive the apparatus of a fashion shoot is a reasonable question, but Sadli’s work has long traded in a certain loosened, un-staged naturalism, and the casting here at least gives the conceit genuine grounding.
The creative team behind the Ami Paris AW26 campaign
The full creative team, as detailed by The Impression, gives some sense of the labour behind that illusion of ease. Creative direction came from Jean-Baptiste Talbourdet-Napoleone. Styling was handled by Elodie David Touboul, with hair by Benjamin Muller and makeup by Adrien Pinault. A roster of that depth does not suggest anything accidental: the studied ease of a campaign like this is, of course, a very deliberate construction.
What Mattiussi is reaching for is something the French fashion tradition has circled for decades: the idea that genuine relationships between designer and dressed are themselves a kind of aesthetic statement. The Ami Paris AW26 campaign positions intimacy not as a marketing strategy but as the actual subject matter. Whether one reads that as warmth or as a very refined form of brand storytelling depends largely on how sentimental one is prepared to be about the fashion industry. The images do not demand you decide.
Friendship as a fashion proposition
Barthes wrote, in his work on the fashion system, about the way clothing is perpetually translated into language, into stories that justify what is simply being sold. The Ami Paris AW26 campaign is unusually candid about that translation. The story it tells (these are my friends, this is who I make clothes for) is at least an honest one, in so far as the models involved have a real and continuing relationship with the house. Saskia De Brauw and Rebecca Leigh, in particular, are figures whose careers have tracked alongside the brand’s own rise.
There is also something worth noting in Sadli’s consistent presence in campaigns of this type. His eye tends toward a slightly bleached, interior quietness: faces held in repose, light that suggests late afternoon rather than a studio grid. It is a register that suits the Ami Paris proposition, which has always positioned itself somewhere between the informality of streetwear and the considered restraint of Parisian ready-to-wear.
Eight faces, one photographer, and a four-person creative team working to make it all look uncontrived: the Ami Paris AW26 campaign is, in that sense, a classically French exercise in making craft disappear into sentiment. That Mattiussi has done it in a season crowded with high-production campaigns from much larger houses makes the restraint read as its own kind of statement.
