Gentle Monster Fall 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Gentle Monster Fall 2025 Ad Campaign by Director Nadia Lee Cohen with model Hunter Schafer

There’s a fine line between glamour and hysteria, and Gentle Monster walks it with chilling confidence in The Hunt, a one-minute fever dream directed by Nadia Lee Cohen and starring Hunter Schafer. Known for its surreal, narrative-driven campaigns, the Korean eyewear label trades cosmic futurism for something darker: a cinematic descent into paranoia and desire. Set within a pulp-noir nightmare that unravels like a forgotten VHS thriller, The Hunt marks a bold creative pivot, one that transforms the act of looking into a weapon of its own.

The imagery is steeped in a classic style of Americana gone wrong. Schafer’s porcelain composure fractures under motel-lamp lighting as she drifts between scenes of domestic unease—a knife glinting under amber light, a lipstick-red dress soaked in tension, a car ride that feels like both an escape and a pursuit. Each frame hums with disquiet, a blend of Mulholland Drive and Carrie. The eyewear itself becomes a conduit for the surreal—sleek, reflective, almost too perfect against the grain of the chaos. It’s a world where vision isn’t clarity but compulsion, and Gentle Monster masterfully frames that contradiction.

Strategically, the campaign signals a fascinating shift for the brand. Where previous narratives leaned on hyper-conceptual installations and speculative futurism, The Hunt reclaims emotional immediacy through atmosphere. Cohen’s direction grounds the absurd in the cinematic; visceral, tactile, and hypnotically tense all while framing the eyewear at the center of the narrative. Schafer’s casting feels deliberate: her androgynous fragility and volatility make her the perfect cipher for Gentle Monster’s ethos of beautiful unease.

In the end, The Hunt isn’t just an eyewear campaign; it’s a study in obsession and identity refracted through a designer lens. It captures the uncanny moment when beauty turns feral, when the gaze consumes as much as it reveals. With haunting visual language and hypnotic performance, The Hunt blurs the line between subject and spectator, asking not what we’re seeing—but what our looking reveals about us.