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.
Piccioli’s debut campaign signals a pivotal shift in Balenciaga’s creative direction, favoring emotional coherence over disruption. The house, once synonymous with provocation, now engages with a cultural moment that elevates intimacy and elegance. This campaign introduces more than a collection—it reshapes the maison’s voice in the luxury landscape. Through a quieter expression of power, Balenciaga aligns itself with a more traditional, and arguably more enduring, mode of storytelling.
Between the sheets and morning light, the campaign unfolds as a quiet proclamation—a study in emotional luxury.
The Rodeo and Le City emerge as vessels of lived-in beauty, each carrying traces of intimacy and memory. Through this lens, Piccioli sketches a vision of Balenciaga’s future built on sincerity and stillness. His debut draws strength from its calm, reminding us that in fashion, evolution often begins with quiet contemplation.
Balenciaga Creative Director | Pierpaolo Piccioli
Photographer | David Sims
Models | Mona Tougaard and Sandra Murray
Location | l’Hôtel de Maisons—Pozzo di Borgo