Zara Studio Spring 2023 Women's Ad Campaign

Review of Zara Studio Spring 2023 Women’s Ad Campaign by Photographer Steven Meisel with models He Cong, Annemary Aderibigbe, Ava Christian, and Ida Heiner

Zara serves up cottage-core romance with the new campaign for its Spring 2023 women’s Studio collection. The dreamy campaign was shot by photographer Steven Meisel.

Taking his cue from the spirit of the collection, which bolsters its prairie boho overtones with details drawn from Scandinavian hygge and Parisian chic, Meisel captures his heroines in a field of wildflowers on an early spring morning. Sepia tones and solar flare add a nostalgic feeling.

The accompanying short film puts these portraits in motion and multiplies them with a split-screen effect, using ambient guitar music and the sounds of wind rustling through a meadow to bolster the atmosphere of dreamy, untroubled bliss expressed by the poetic spoken word voiceover.

While the campaign does create an immersive visual atmosphere, it does feel like one that we’ve seen before, and that actually feels a bit generic and dated. It feels like a revisiting of the boho-chic aesthetic that reached its peak in the early 2010s – too long ago to feel relevant and cool, too recent to be a nostalgic revival like the extended Y2K moment we seem to still be in. Zara has been doing good work over the past few years (thanks in large part to a partnership with creative director Fabien Baron, who oversees the likes of Prada) to elevate itself with strong campaigns that are on a level with luxury brands and distance itself from the lowest-common-denominator catalog imagery we might associate with some of its competitors. Aside from the names of its models and photographer, this campaign feels like a bit of a slip back into the latter category.