Ferragamo Fall 2026 Ad Campaign

Review of Ferragamo Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Maximilian Davis and Creative Agency Baron & Baron, Inc. with Photographer and Director Johnny Dufort, featuring Jingyu Huang, Ning Chang, Anok Yai, Vittoria Ceretti, and Thibaud Charon

Ferragamo’s Fall 2026 campaign begins with an idea well suited to the house: desire expressed through shoes. Under creative director Maximilian Davis, working with Baron & Baron and photographer-director Johnny Dufort, the campaign revisits Ferragamo’s history of cinematic women surrounded by footwear, filtering that legacy through Surrealism and Dada. The premise carries cultural potential. Shoes can contain memory, aspiration, labor, fetish, and mobility. Across much of the series, that density is reduced to accumulation. Products scatter across marble floors while mirrors and direct flash announce eccentricity. The result feels staged to resemble an adventurous fashion campaign, and the adventure rarely moves beyond arrangement.

Anok Yai seated on Willie Cole’s 1994 sculpture provides the exception. Constructed from worn shoes, the chair carries histories of consumption, class, use, and discarded value. Yai’s poised authority and vivid red leather give the object a contemporary charge, allowing Ferragamo’s footwear legacy to enter a meaningful conversation with art. The image asks how ordinary objects become status symbols, cultural records, and eventual waste. The surrounding photographs lose that pressure. Scattered shoes become merchandising devices, and mirrored rooms supply familiar campaign shorthand. Vittoria Ceretti’s gold tableau offers glamour, while the portraits of Jingyu Huang and Ning Chang provide crisp product clarity. These images stop short of extending the intellectual stakes introduced by Cole’s sculpture.

That missed opportunity carries particular weight for a house whose credibility rests on footwear innovation and craft. Consumers increasingly expect heritage to generate a relevant point of view. A Surrealist reference gains value through transformation, and much of this campaign leaves the transformation incomplete. Lotta Volkova’s styling gives the collection graphic coherence, while Dufort’s compositions maintain a polished, deliberately off-kilter mood. The objective verdict is a weak campaign carried by one genuinely persuasive image. Cole’s chair demonstrates how Ferragamo’s archive can acquire cultural urgency through collaboration, material history, and friction. If one chair can make the house’s legacy feel so alive, why does the surrounding campaign leave it sitting still?