The Velvet Stare
Review of Jacques Marie Mage Spring 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Haider Ackermann and Director and Photographer Steven Klein with model Lauren Hutton
Jacques Marie Mage enters into collaboration with Haider Ackermann not through spectacle alone, but through atmosphere. For Spring 2026, the Los Angeles eyewear house translates Ackermann’s emotionally charged elegance into a sharply controlled series of objects and images, pairing handcrafted frames with a campaign directed and photographed by Steven Klein starring Lauren Hutton. The result feels less like a traditional luxury launch than a study in persona: a meditation on glamour as armor, eccentricity as identity, and eyewear as both concealment and revelation.
Klein’s campaign imagery leans heavily into tension. Chain-link fences, distorted overlays, bruised blue lighting, and looming shadow figures create an environment suspended somewhere between noir cinema and psychological dreamscape. Lauren Hutton, meanwhile, moves through the scenes with remarkable force. Her presence grounds the campaign in lived experience rather than polished nostalgia, transforming the eyewear into symbols of resilience and character rather than disposable fashion objects. Whether smoking beneath claw-like shadows or staring directly through mirrored lenses, Hutton embodies the kind of cultivated defiance both Ackermann and Jérôme Mage seem intent on preserving.
The strongest images are those where distortion becomes narrative. Faces overlap, shadows fracture across fencing, and the eyewear itself appears almost ghostly, hovering between utility and fetish object. Klein resists the sterile precision that often dominates luxury eyewear advertising, instead embracing grain, blur, and visual abrasion. The campaign’s recurring phrase — “the velvet stare” — captures this duality well: softness and severity held in uneasy balance. Even the blue-lit portraits, theatrical to the point of abstraction, maintain a hypnotic coherence through disciplined styling and silhouette work.
That same rigor carries into the product design. The Balthazar, Gaspard, and Melchior frames all channel Ackermann’s fascination with elongated proportion and architectural restraint while remaining unmistakably Jacques Marie Mage in construction. The use of cured acetate, beta titanium, leather wrapping, and mirrored Armorlite lenses reinforces the brand’s longstanding fixation on material excess and artisanal precision. Particularly compelling are the CUIR editions, where black leather wrapping lends the frames a tactile intimacy that mirrors Ackermann’s often sensual approach to tailoring. Rather than functioning as accessories alone, the glasses are positioned as personal artifacts — objects designed to absorb identity over time.
Still, the campaign occasionally risks collapsing beneath the weight of its own mythology. The language surrounding “objects of desire,” “protection,” and “projection” borders at times on overwrought abstraction, particularly when paired with the aggressively cinematic visuals. Yet this excess also feels intentional. Jacques Marie Mage has long operated within a world where rarity, mystique, and emotional storytelling matter as much as function, and Ackermann’s sensibility only amplifies that philosophy. The collaboration succeeds because it commits fully to its own universe instead of diluting itself for broader accessibility.
What emerges is a campaign less interested in selling eyewear than in constructing aura. In a luxury landscape increasingly dominated by clean minimalism and algorithmic polish, Jacques Marie Mage and Haider Ackermann instead embrace eccentricity, friction, and psychological depth. The result is unsettling, glamorous, and occasionally theatrical to the point of absurdity — but never forgettable.
Jacques Marie Mage Creative Director | Jérôme Jacques Marie Mage
Creative Director | Haider Ackermann
Director & Photographer | Steven Klein
Model | Lauren Hutton