Mugler Fall 2026 Ad Campaign

Bad Behavior

Review of Mugler Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by Photographer Robi Rodriguez with model Vivian Jenna Wilson

Mugler’s Fall 2026 campaign, The Commander, puts Vivian Jenna Wilson at the center of Miguel Castro Freitas’ increasingly intriguing reconstruction of the house, photographed by Robi Rodriguez with the cool menace of a fashion story that knows perfectly well where the bodies might be buried. The campaign accompanies the second collection in Castro Freitas’ Trilogy of Glorified Clichés, his examination of the archetypes embedded in Mugler’s history. This time, the cliché under interrogation is power dressing. But rather than merely dressing Wilson as the woman in charge, Mugler asks the more entertaining question: what happens when authority starts enjoying itself?

There is unmistakably a whiff of Helmut Newton in the proceedings. Not simply because we have imposing women, severe tailoring, voyeuristic interiors, exposed flesh, and an atmosphere hovering somewhere between privilege and threat, but because the photographs understand one of Newton’s most useful tricks: power becomes interesting when we’re not entirely sure who possesses it. Wilson lounges in tailoring while a nude figure stands before her holding a handbag. Elsewhere she confronts her reflection, sits imperiously in a wheelchair-like chair, appears surrounded by snarling dogs, or stands rigidly in anonymous rooms that seem simultaneously bourgeois, institutional, and faintly sinister. Rodriguez keeps changing the hierarchy.

That instability is the campaign’s greatest strength. Wilson is sometimes commander, sometimes observer, sometimes mannequin, sometimes almost captive. Her expression rarely provides an answer. The slicked-back hair and extraordinary architectural shoulders create a kind of human exoskeleton, while orange-red lips inject a controlled flash of carnality. Even when the clothes become spectacular, as with the pleated collar spreading around her head or the metallic gold silhouette, she remains curiously impassive. The clothes are doing the shouting. Wilson simply stares you down.

The domestic setting makes the fantasy considerably more interesting. Nothing here resembles the gleaming futuristic environments that might be the obvious backdrop for Mugler’s sculptural clothes. Instead there are worn mirrors, beige carpeting, modest bathrooms, cane furniture, dated cabinetry, a peculiar modernist lamp, an open suitcase, and rooms with the vaguely unsettling anonymity of somewhere temporarily occupied. The collision is delicious. Castro Freitas’ hyper-controlled silhouettes look almost too sophisticated for their surroundings, as though an exotic predator has wandered into a provincial drawing room and nobody has yet decided whether to call animal control.

Then there are the dogs. Rodriguez photographs them with startling physical immediacy: teeth, gums, tongues, fur, agitation. Against Wilson’s almost unnerving composure, their instinct becomes the campaign’s counterpoint. She is disciplined into an immaculate silhouette while they snarl, bark, and respond without mediation. One image places her motionless against a blue wall as the animals crowd the foreground; another surrounds her fur-clad body with them in a decaying conservatory. The obvious reading is domination, but the better one is identification. The campaign gradually suggests that the feral energy belongs as much to her as to them.

That tension connects intelligently with Castro Freitas’ stated interest in the “seduction of power.” Mugler has never exactly been shy about authority. Thierry Mugler’s women could resemble executives, superheroes, insects, dominatrices, automobiles, or creatures from another galaxy, occasionally all before lunch. What Castro Freitas seems to understand is that reproducing those codes literally would reduce an extraordinarily complicated legacy to shoulder pads and nostalgia. Instead, he treats power dressing as theater. Belts cinch like restraints, shoulders become architecture, gloves imply both etiquette and fetish, and the military precision of the clothes begins to look less like corporate authority than ritualized control.

There is also something psychologically astute about casting Wilson within that proposition. Without requiring the campaign to turn her biography into its subject, her presence brings an awareness of visibility, self-definition, and the public construction of identity. Rodriguez doesn’t photograph her as someone asking for permission to occupy Mugler’s mythology. She seems to be testing it, occasionally mocking it, and perhaps discovering which parts are useful. That distinction matters. A campaign about female power can become painfully earnest very quickly; The Commander is smarter when it allows power to be pleasurable, ridiculous, erotic, frightening, and performative all at once.

The photographs involving mirrors and reflections push that idea further. In one, the figure we see from behind does not appear to correspond neatly with the figure confronting us from the mirror. Elsewhere, a double exposure fractures Wilson into competing versions of herself. These aren’t subtle devices, but subtlety isn’t necessarily the Mugler brief. They turn the campaign’s question of commander and commanded inward: perhaps the most difficult figure to control is one’s own image.

If there is a weakness, it is that the campaign occasionally becomes so enamored with its catalogue of symbols that the narrative threatens to fragment. Dogs, nudity, mirrors, fetish gloves, institutional interiors, power tailoring, fur, surveillance-like framing, and surreal furniture each bring their own psychological baggage. Newton could make a single heel, doorway, or glance carry an entire sexual power structure. Here, Rodriguez and Castro Freitas sometimes put every guest at the party in the same room. A little more restraint might have made the menace even sharper.

But excess has historically been one of Mugler’s better vices, and The Commander understands that. More importantly, it doesn’t confuse reverence for the archive with embalming it. Castro Freitas is beginning to locate a vocabulary in which the familiar Mugler woman can be powerful without becoming a museum piece, while Rodriguez gives that proposition enough grime, humor, sexuality, and strangeness to prevent the exercise from becoming another immaculate luxury campaign.

The Commander may announce itself as a study in authority, but its most compelling moments arrive when authority slips its leash. The tailoring commands, Wilson refuses to explain herself, and the dogs appear to know something the rest of us don’t. Somewhere, Helmut Newton might have appreciated the joke: good behavior was never particularly photogenic.