Jordan Wolfson’s Unsettling Prada Campaign: Art Meets Fashion SS26

Explore Jordan Wolfson's provocative Spring/Summer 2026 campaign for Prada, featuring unsettling imagery, menacing birds, and a critique of the intersection between art and fashion.

As Wolfson’s subjects say those words aloud, the birds nearby them– which seem computer-generated, or at the very least computer-altered, offered their luster and their abnormal size– gradually move. When the actress and model Hunter Schafer appears here, a bird-man crossbreed with black natural leather boots ominously raises its hands behind her, looking directly at the audience while breathing deeply. Schafer, beaming, does not appear to see the animal behind her.

In a statement going along with the project, Prada praised Wolfson’s contribution for opening up “continuous possibilities, multiplicities of identification and being, of what Prada can be, just how it can be perceived, and re-perceived, through constantly-questioned conventions of an advertising campaign.” This appears like a twee analysis of a project that is created to sneak out and entry in equivalent step. Wolfson’s newest jobs seem to weaken style brands’ special capacity to defang the art produced for cooperations.

The Intersection of Art and High Fashion

Brands from Dior to Louis Vuitton have in current years tapped artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Cosima von Bonin, Tyler Mitchell, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Julien Nguyen, and Isabella Ducrot– to name just a few– for partnerships over the last few years, both to create fresh benefit runway shows and to aid develop marketing campaign like the brand-new one by Prada. The trend led Art in America’s Emily Watlington to create, in 2024, “We should be asking, is style sustaining the arts or is it subsuming them?”

Wolfson’s latest works appear to weaken fashion brand names’ one-of-a-kind capacity to defang the art created for collaborations.

A Glimpse into the SS26 Campaign Visuals

Mercifully, the Prada project includes no such instances of carnage, however it does keep Wolfson’s continuous attraction with strange electronic characters. Its still photos include a series of designs– consisting of the actors Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, and Damson Idris– standing next to larger-than-life birds that seem greater than a little menacing.

Wolfson initially made his name as a video clip musician, and the Prada campaign additionally consists of a brief moving-image work that is billed as his first foray into the tool given that Riverboat Song, his acclaimed 2017– 18 piece. These words additionally make up the title of the campaign, which is called “I, I, I, I AM … PRADA.”

Jordan Wolfson’s Legacy of Provocative Art

Prada’s present advertising campaign for its Spring/Summer 2026 collection is an unsettling event, and not a surprise its maker is an artist understood for disturbing video clip art and sculptures: Jordan Wolfson, whose past jobs have actually included a gyrating cyborg, chained-up creatures, and various other horrors.

Wolfson initially made his name as a video clip artist, and the Prada campaign also includes a short moving-image work that is billed as his initial foray into the medium considering that Riverboat Tune, his acclaimed 2017– 18 item. In the new video, Prada’s versions numbly right into words “I” a few times, then at last utter the expression “I am.” These words also comprise the title of the campaign, which is called “I, I, I, I AM … PRADA.”

Wolfson’s art is popular– and, in many cases, infamous– for its representations of physical violence, both of the psychological and physical range. A VR work that he generated for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, as an example, enabled visitors to witness a male being bludgeoned by a variation of Wolfson himself wielding a baseball bat. Another virtual reality job made last year for the Fondation Beyeler, a gallery simply outside Basel, Switzerland, body-swapped its participants, without much caution to audiences in advance that this would certainly happen.