Isabel Marant Fall 2021 Ad Campaign

Review of Isabel Marant Fall 2021 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Julien Gallico with Photographer Alasdair McLellan with models Adut Akech Bior, Rianne Van Rompaey, Anna Ewers, Leon Dame

Isabel Marant embraces brutalism in a new Fall 2021 campaign. With creative direction from Julien Gallico and photography by Alasdair McLellan, the campaign fuses architecture and music with fashion for an interdisciplinary expansion of the designer’s creative world.

McLellan’s black-and-white imagery is dominated by his models; they fill up the entire composition and then some, with limbs and tops of heads extending beyond the frame. Situated next to a brutalist skyscraper that rises into the distance, they feel especially larger-than-life. The photographs hearken back to the straightforward and striking fashion and music portraits of the ’90s. Slick art direction finishes the images off with the Isabel Marant logo in a beautiful shade of blue, the only color to appear in the campaign.

The short film makes further and excellent aesthetic use of the building in the photographs: London’s Barbican Estate, a masterpiece of brutalist architecture. The solid lines, concrete and glistening glass and epic proportions of the structure both harmonize and contrast with the looks from the collection, which mingles the strong, structured silhouettes of jackets with more flowing and free pieces like leather pants or skirts and silk shirts. A pulsing electronic soundtrack emphasizes the energy and rhythm of the architecture and snappy cinematography.