Alaïa

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Review of Alaïa Winter Spring 2027 Archetypes Campaign Ad Campaign by Art Directors Aleksandra Woroniecka and Fabrice Paineau with Photographer Drew Vickers with models Doutzen Kroes and Lina Zhang

Alaïa’s latest campaign asks you to step back and come closer, often at the same time. A sharply drawn silhouette occupies one half of the picture; a face, enlarged almost beyond comfortable conversational distance, fills the other. Photographed by Drew Vickers, the Winter Spring 2027 Archetypes campaign stars Doutzen Kroes and Lina Zhang in clothes that know exactly where to put a waist. The faces beside them are rather less concerned with keeping everything in line.

That is where this otherwise restrained campaign finds its interest. Kroes’s hair is pulled back, her gaze direct, but the close crops leave the fine texture of her skin visible. Zhang’s portraits bring us close enough to notice the shimmer on an eyelid and the small hairs beside an ear. Sandrine Cano Bock’s makeup and Benjamin Muller’s hair keep the women polished without erasing those particulars. Against clothes so deliberately shaped, the faces offer something less obedient. The House may have perfected its curves, but a portrait needs a little more room to be human.

Vickers, returning after photographing the first Archetypes campaign in 2023, understands how much can happen through a change of scale. In one pairing, Zhang sits in a yellow chair wearing gray tailoring, her legs spread and her jacket drawn tightly through the waist. Beside her, an enormous crop of her face makes a gold earring almost architectural. The suit has authority, but her posture gives it ease. She looks comfortable taking up space, which tells us more about the clothes than another immaculate standing pose would.

Kroes brings a different kind of physical confidence. Seated on a wheeled studio stool in black, she folds one leg across the other, a mesh flat resting beneath her hand. The ordinary seat is a useful foil for a silhouette this controlled: the adjustment lever and little casters keep the picture from floating away into an abstract celebration of form. In the red ribbed dress, her raised arms extend the lines of the knit before the skirt breaks into loose, fluttering lengths. Here, Alaïa’s relationship with the body becomes something we can see happening rather than something the campaign needs to explain.

Art Directors Aleksandra Woroniecka and Fabrice Paineau also give the accessories their own encounters. A red sandal balances on a narrow red table beside Kroes’s portrait; a small yellow-green bag lies against a glossy yellow chair. A spotted white bag rests on a blue folding chair opposite Zhang in white. Those flashes of color bring welcome appetite to the pale surroundings. More usefully, the objects retain their peculiarities. The sandal’s looping straps and the bag’s compact shape have enough presence to hold half a spread without a model being asked to demonstrate how desirable they are.

The diptychs are less persuasive when they begin to feel interchangeable. An enlarged face lends immediate intensity to almost anything placed beside it, and repeated across the series, that device occasionally supplies the emotion rather than discovering it. The women’s expressions vary less than their clothes, leaving some of the promised intimacy just beyond reach. The strongest pictures are the ones where a specific posture complicates the precision: Zhang settling into the chair, Kroes folding herself onto the stool. A little more of that ease would have made the series feel more personal.

Still, Archetypes is a fitting name for a campaign interested in what remains recognizable through a change of proportion. Alaïa’s shaped waists and close-fitting knits need little scenery to establish their identity, while Vickers gives the women enough presence to meet the clothes on equal terms. The pleasure comes from looking between the two halves and finding that neither quite explains the other. The cut may be exact. The woman gets to keep a few secrets.