H&M Spring 2023 Ad Campaign Review

Review of H&M ‘Innovation Re-Enchantment Design Story Collection’ Spring 2023 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Li Von Euler and Photographer Kristin-Lee Moolman with models Abény Nhial and Assa Baradji

H&M celebrates its Innovation Re-Enchantment Design Story Collection for Spring 2023 with a slick and otherworldly campaign. Responding to the collection’s balance of bold contemporary style and environmental consciousness, the campaign was shot by photographer Kristin-Lee Moolman with creative direction from Li Von Euler.

While the title of the collection seems like quite a mouthful, the attention is deserved for an important and rare collection that centers sustainability and innovation while remaining accessible. While the designs themselves combine retro-futurism with party-ready embellishments, their origins attest to crucial developments in pivoting toward recycling and sustainable practices in the creation of clothing.

Key pieces of the collection comprise a series of mini dresses, with two emerald-green and citrine-yellow styles rendered in recycled polyester and amped up with sequins made from recycled PET plastic bottles, with rhinestones and beads made from recycled plastic display shelves and boxes. Meanwhile a pearly-white embellished mini dress is created from a linen-viscose blend, using traceable viscose sourced from certified sustainable forests. Rhinestone-trimmed denim pieces in a blend of organic and recycled cotton form a streetwise counterpoint. A pair of statement platform shoes in an organic silk and viscose blend that uses viscose derived from renewable wood sources and bold jewelry in post-consumer recycled brass complete the line-up.

Moolman’s photographs situate models Abény Nhial and Assa Baradji in a desolate and otherworldly landscape where white sands give way to rocky crags and steam rises mystically from deep within the earth. While the images look very cool, especially in the textural interplay of the collection’s recycled embellishments and the visual rhythm of the identical styling, it takes on an ominous tone when considered in connection with the collection’s environmental consciousness. Is this what the Earth will look like if we continue on our current path – devoid of life, stripped of resources, hostile and barren?

At once super stylish and chilling, the campaign is both a reminder of the urgency for a change of direction and a message of how beautiful that change can be.