Review of Balenciaga ‘Heart and Body’ Summer 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli with Photographer David Sims with models Danielle Deadwyler, Harris Dickinson, Havana Rose Liu, Hudson Williams, Roh Yoonseo, Winona Ryder, Mona Tougaard, Ned Sims, Sen Samysheva
With Heart and Body, Balenciaga enters a new chapter under Pierpaolo Piccioli, and the shift is immediate. Where the house has long been associated with provocation and intellectual austerity, Piccioli proposes something relational. Community becomes the thesis. Not uniformity, not aesthetic allegiance, but resonance.
Lensed by David Sims, the campaign introduces Winona Ryder, Roh Yoonseo, and Harris Dickinson as brand ambassadors alongside a deliberately eclectic circle of Friends of the House. The casting reads less like a roster and more like an assembly. Faces marked by experience sit beside emerging talents. Artists, actors, musicians, and models share the frame. According to the press release, Piccioli sought “individuals, not characters,” and that intention carries through in the portraits’ directness.
The setting, described as a suspended, heterotopic atelier space, reinforces the emotional tone. Gridded compositions and raw architectural references evoke primed canvas, an in-between place where identities feel paused long enough to be seen clearly. There is a quietness here, an almost devotional stillness. Sims captures each subject in proximity, sometimes at close range, sometimes stepping back, allowing personality to register without overstatement. Even the sonic collage of interviews layered into the video component suggests conversation over declaration.
Piccioli’s treatment of the body is central. He emphasizes ease, confidence, and exchange between body and garment. The clothes hold volume yet appear light. Tailoring coexists with fluidity. There is discipline in the cut and softness in the movement. Piccioli insists that the person wears the clothing, never the reverse. That philosophy subtly reorients Balenciaga’s relationship to power. Authority here is internal. It comes from the wearer’s presence rather than the silhouette’s exaggeration.
What makes this campaign compelling is its refusal to flatten identity. Winona Ryder carries decades of cinematic memory into the frame. Harris Dickinson brings a contemporary gravity. Roh Yoonseo embodies a different cultural lens. Around them, the wider cast expands the narrative. The effect is cumulative. Individuality builds toward something shared. Piccioli is constructing a house defined less by shock and more by empathy, less by spectacle and more by connection.
This is an ambitious repositioning. Community as aesthetic can feel abstract if it remains rhetorical. In Heart and Body, it is rendered tangible through casting, composition, and tone. Balenciaga Summer 2026 signals that the house’s future may lie in dialogue. The campaign suggests that strength and sensitivity are not opposing values but complementary ones. In that alignment, Piccioli articulates a Balenciaga grounded in people first, image second, and meaning sustained through the relationships between them.
Balenciaga Creative Director | Pierpaolo Piccioli
Photographer | David Sims
Models | Danielle Deadwyler, Harris Dickinson, Havana Rose Liu, Hudson Williams, Roh Yoonseo, Winona Ryder, Mona Tougaard, Ned Sims, Sen Samysheva