Alaïa Fall 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Alaïa Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Art Director Ezra Petronio & Lana Petrusevych with Photographer Tyrone Lebon with models Loli Bahia and Nastassia Legrand

Few houses lean on continuity as gracefully as Alaïa. With its Fall 2025 campaign, Pieter Mulier and longtime collaborator Tyrone Lebon (joined this aseason by Frank Lebon for moving image) deepen the cinematic language that has steadily become their signature. Starring Loli Bahia and Nastassia Legrand and shot on the northern coast of France, the campaign is the first in the house’s history to be captured entirely outdoors — and it feels like Alaïa has stepped beyond the walls of its Parisian sanctum into something mythic.

The images arrive like fragments of a film, each black-and-white still composed with stark precision yet alive with movement. Bahia and Legrand, faces framed by hoods and gowns shaped by shadow and wind, appear not simply as models but as characters — women out of time, half Austen heroine, half Brontë specter. Their silhouettes are pure and sculptural, yet the surrounding landscape of Cap Blanc-Nez and Cap Gris-Nez pulls them into a raw, elemental world. It is an Alaïa vision filtered through the atmospheres of Jane Campion or Stanley Kubrick: dramatic, haunted, yet profoundly modern.

There is strength in this expansion. If last season’s Archetypes campaign was sun-warmed intimacy, and Spring 2025 with Daria Werbowy distilled Alaïa’s minimalism into two almost sacred images, Fall 2025 demonstrates a bolder ambition. It doesn’t just suggest intimacy; it stages solitude. The choice to work outdoors, with no architecture but cliff and tide, underscores Alaïa’s fascination with timelessness. The images could belong to the 19th century or to tomorrow. This refusal of temporal anchoring — a woman both Jane Eyre and modern Alaïa muse — is precisely what keeps the house’s storytelling compelling.

Of course, such conceptual gravitas carries risks. Alaïa’s campaigns often walk a tightrope between austerity and allure, and here the severity of black-and-white, coupled with the starkness of the setting, may feel forbidding to some viewers. The campaign captures mood impeccably, but it stops short of narrating progression. The video element, directed by Frank Lebon, helps soften that austerity, animating the garments with motion and gesture. Yet one wonders whether more narrative depth could have brought the story into sharper relief, especially given the filmic ambition.

Still, the synthesis of references — Flemish portraiture, literary heroines, auteur cinema — results in something unmistakably Alaïa: powerful women framed not as muses but as myths. Mulier continues to demonstrate that Alaïa campaigns need not overwhelm in number of images or elaborate sets; they endure by cultivating atmosphere. This season expands that philosophy outward, proving that the house can find the same intimacy on a windswept shore as in a hotel room or private villa.

In that sense, Fall 2025 is a milestone. It shows Alaïa confident enough to embrace cinema without surrendering its restraint, to acknowledge history without becoming historical. Through Tyrone and Frank Lebon’s lenses, Bahia and Legrand become both solitary and eternal, figures who belong as much to the cliffs of northern France as they do to the lineage of Alaïa women.

Alaïa has long argued that timelessness is not the absence of change, but the ability to evolve without losing essence. This campaign proves the point: solitary yet communal, severe yet free, literary yet cinematic. In a fashion landscape obsessed with immediacy, Alaïa reminds us that the most powerful stories are the ones that feel like they have always existed.