Review of Balenciaga Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli and Photographer David Sims with models Mona Tougaard and Sandra Murray
Setting aside spectacle in favor of intimacy, Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first campaign as creative director of Balenciaga illuminates a campaign that embodies a new, deeply personal era for the maison. Captured by David Sims and modeled by Mona Tougaard and Sandra Murray, the series marks a contemplative debut—one that favors emotion over excess. In a world accustomed to Balenciaga’s provocation, Piccioli’s vision arrives like an exhale: restrained and quietly radical. This is not a campaign designed to shock, but to listen—to recalibrate what the house’s power can feel like when stripped of outside noise.
The imagery unfolds across the hushed interiors of Paris’s Hôtel de Maisons–Pozzo di Borgo, where morning light brushes against unmade linens and reflective pauses. Tougaard and Murray lounge with ease, their gestures spontaneous yet deliberate, each scene suspended between repose and reflection. Framed around two enduring emblems of the house, the Rodeo and Le City bags anchor the visual language: supple, storied, and self-assured. Sims’ portraits blur the line between fashion image and personal memory, capturing the kind of beauty that doesn’t perform, but simply exists, perhaps even an extension of self.
What communicates most powerfully here is the restraint. Piccioli’s Balenciaga does not posture; it breathes. The campaign’s minimal palette and pared styling allow the viewer to consider silhouette and texture with new clarity. The tension between youth and sophistication, softness and strength, feels intentional—an echo of the dualities that have always defined the brand. Though serene, the images could risk quieting Balenciaga’s edge to a whisper. Yet perhaps that’s the point: this is a brand pausing to feel its pulse before reasserting its rhythm.
Between the sheets and morning light, the campaign reads as a quiet proclamation: a study in emotional luxury. By framing the Rodeo and Le City not as accessories but as vessels of lived-in beauty, Piccioli redefines what Balenciaga’s future may hold: not louder, but truer. His debut does not shout for attention; it earns it through stillness, reminding us that in fashion, evolution sometimes begins from quiet contemplation.
Balenciaga Creative Director | Pierpaolo Piccioli
Photographer | David Sims
Models | Mona Tougaard and Sandra Murray
Location | l’Hôtel de Maisons—Pozzo di Borgo