Fendi Fall 2023 Ad Campaign Review

Review of Fendi Fall 2023 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Ronnie Cooke Newhouse & Karl Bolander with Photographer Craig McDean with models Rianne Van Rompaey, Julia Nobis, Mona Tougaard, Yilan Hua, Migoa Majoang, and Farah Nieuwburg

Fendi explores the quirky beauty of everyday elegance with its new Fall 2023 women’s campaign. The campaign features creative direction from Ronnie Cooke Newhouse and Karl Bolander with photography by Craig McDean.

The Fall 2023 collection saw Kim Jones fuse a classically elegant and wearable Fendi ethos with subtle twists of deconstruction and hybridity. McDean’s photographs put a simple focus on two key looks from the collection, but it is in the short film where its spirit really comes to life.

Set to skittish jazz, the film sees its roster of top models both lean into and subvert our expectations for the formalism of a Fendi campaign. In one moment they exude inscrutable elegance as they meet the camera with a stoic gaze, but in the next they burst out into a self-aware smile or playful dance steps. In connection with the designs’ spirit of an idiosyncratic personal twist on everyday dressing, the campaign becomes an ode to the quirky beauty of expressing one’s individuality.

Disrupting the timeless allure of ladylike sophistication with the everyday reality of individual personality, the campaign is one of the strongest statements of Kim Jones’ vision for the Fendi woman yet.