Ferragamo Fall 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Ferragamo Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Fabien Baron of Agency Baron&Baron with Photographer Craig McDean with models Mariacarla Boscono, Awar Odhiang, Apolline Rocco Fohrer, Tim Schuhmacher

For Ferragamo’s Fall 2025 campaign, Maximilian Davis pivots toward a mood of restraint, staging his collection through Craig McDean’s lens in a manner that channels classic Italian cinema. The cast—Mariacarla Boscono, Awar Odhiang, Apolline Rocco Fohrer, and Tim Schuhmacher—inhabits interiors of faded grandeur, their presence caught in stills that recall a Visconti tableau or a neorealist vignette. Fabien Baron’s art direction favors a pared-back cinematic homage: stolen glances, muted gestures, and accessories held in focus like props in a film still.

If more understated than some of its predecessors, the campaign nonetheless carries a polish and control that signal Davis’ ongoing refinement of the Ferragamo vocabulary. There’s a sense of timelessness here, a cinematic stillness that lingers, though it comes at the expense of the boldness that has recently defined the house’s storytelling.

That contrast becomes clearer when positioned against Ferragamo’s recent trajectory. The “Ferragamo’s New Renaissance” campaign of Fall 2023 with Tyler Mitchell embedded the collection into Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, grounding Davis’ vision directly in the city’s cultural DNA. The following seasons under Ferdinando Verderi’s creative direction built on that momentum: Juergen Teller’s mischievous lens reframed Ferragamo’s Florentine grandeur with a wry irreverence, while Alice Rohrwacher’s L’Appuntamento for Pre-Fall 2025 turned Cinecittà into a meta-cinematic stage, balancing glamour with irony and wit. Each of these campaigns advanced a narrative of Ferragamo as not only rooted in Florence but also fluent in contemporary cultural dialogue.

By contrast, Fall 2025 retreats from that dynamic interplay. McDean’s imagery is immaculately composed, but the tightly cropped product shots verge on the generic, lacking the cultural weight and conceptual spark of earlier campaigns. The accessories, which should be protagonists, risk appearing ornamental—closer to catalogue precision than cinematic seduction. This restraint can read as elegance, but in a season where the house might have needed a bold statement, it feels muted.

The short film, however, adds a dimension that reframes the campaign. Set within a villa and underscored by lilting, unmistakably Italian music, the film brings the cast together under one roof, giving context to the fragmented stills. The voiceover—delivered in Italian with lines about love, choice, and the desire simply “to be seen”—infuses the campaign with subtext. What in photographs might feel like isolated poses becomes, in motion, a story of intimacy, rivalry, and play. The repeated notion of “a game” suggests a theatricality at the heart of the work: these characters aren’t just wearing Ferragamo, they’re moving through a narrative where glances and gestures carry hidden meanings. It’s here, in the interplay of stillness and motion, that the campaign finds its pulse.

The subdued cinematic homage may appeal to an audience craving timelessness over reinvention. But the house has proven, through campaigns like Ferragamo’s New Renaissance and L’Appuntamento, that it can embrace art, cinema, and culture with far greater force and originality. In choosing understatement this season, Ferragamo has delivered something handsome but faintly undercharged. One leaves the campaign longing for a return to the resonance of Florence’s piazzas, its art galleries, and its storied film sets—those moments when the house felt less like it was paying tribute to heritage and more like it was actively writing it anew.