Prada’s SS26 campaign transforms fashion into an exercise in visual reflection, questioning traditional advertising and redefining the relationship between image, viewer and desire in the digital age.
Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 campaign is not designed to sell a collection, but to question how we look at fashion itself. Built around the concept of perspective, the Italian house unveils one of its most intellectual and experimental campaigns in recent years, reaffirming its role as a cultural reference that extends far beyond trends.
Shot by Oliver Hadlee Pearch, the campaign brings together a diverse cast of brand ambassadors, artists and actors who embody the contemporary spirit of the house. Among them are Hunter Schafer, John Glacier, Damson Idris and Carey Mulligan, captured in a series of images that function as visual collages charged with irony and critical reflection.
Departing from the classic fashion advertising narrative, Prada introduces a meta-visual game: external hands are shown holding the campaign images, which are themselves being photographed. This seemingly simple gesture disrupts the role of the viewer and breaks an invisible fourth wall, forcing us to reconsider who is observing whom — and from where desire is constructed.
The images are further reinterpreted by American artist Anne Collier, whose intervention adds a distinctly digital and contemporary reading of advertising imagery. The result is a campaign that speaks directly to internet culture, the infinite reproduction of images and the transformation — or erosion — of aura within contemporary fashion.
Rather than foregrounding garments, the SS26 campaign celebrates the art of the image, Prada’s longstanding dialogue with contemporary art, and its ongoing willingness to challenge, provoke and redefine the visual language of luxury. In a landscape saturated with stimuli, the house opts for intellectual pause and critical re-evaluation of the medium itself.
With this proposal, Prada does more than launch a new collection: it poses an open question about the future of advertising, the authorship of images and the way we consume fashion in the digital age. A campaign not merely to be seen, but to be thought.
