MZ Wallace Fall 2024 Ad Campaign

Review of MZ Wallace Fall 2024 Ad Campaign by Monica Zwirner & Lucy Wallace Eustice with Creative Director Dennis Freedman and Artist David Shrigley by Photographer Raymond Meier

MZ Wallace launches its first-ever brand campaign, celebrating the accessories brand’s irreverent spirit through a unique and joyful artistic partnership developed in collaboration with renowned creative director Dennis Freedman. Wisely building on co-founder Monica Zwirner’s connections with the fine-art world and Freedman’s discerning eye for art and text in ad communication, the campaign takes shape as a creative dialogue between artist David Shrigley and photographer Raymond Meier.

“MZ Wallace has been an unconventional brand from the beginning,” reflected co-founders Monica Zwirner and Lucy Eustice Wallace.

To celebrate our upcoming 25^th anniversary, we wanted to launch a campaign that was irreverent and original, something that would challenge the viewer to take another look. We love David’s work for its wit, humor and sly commentary and pairing some of his drawings with Raymond Meier’s surreal twists on them perfectly express the ethos of our brand. – Monica Zwirner and Lucy Eustice Wallace

“Our customers are curious and intelligent,” added the duo. “The campaign invites them into a story that they are free to interpret through their own engaged lens just as our bags empower them to express their individuality. We’re not defining the campaign through one sole message, just as our bags don’t define our customers.”

The campaign unfolds as a creative dialogue between Meier’s photographs and Shrigley’s paintings, each of which draw a sense of the unexpected, quirky, and uplifting out of familiar elements of everyday life. Meier’s compositions pair MZ Wallace’s signature bags with unexpected cargo, like a big bouquet of roses or a ceramic hamburger, or in seemingly random locations that create a strange sense of story, like locked in a dog kennel.

These still-lifes take on further dimension as they are put in conversation with Shrigley’s bright and cartoonish paintings of flora, fauna, and fungi that are accompanied by tongue-in-cheek maxims: for example, “when life gives you a lemon, you must eat the lemon (all of it including the skin).”

Speaking to the process of bringing this creative combination together, creative director Dennis Freedman said, ‘For their first campaign, MZ Wallace wanted to break the mold of traditional accessory advertising.

The goal was for the ads to be challenging, witty and open to interpretation—qualities embodied by Monica and Lucy themselves. The artist David Shrigley and the photographer Raymond Meier each have a unique point of view. Although their work is inherently different, I saw that, together, they would create an unexpected synergy. Monica and Lucy were very excited about the possibilities of this pairing and were willing to take a risk. – Dennis Freedman

That risk has certainly paid off. The campaign is immediate, striking, and playful on its own terms, but it also takes on a wider impact and invites reflection about the use of text and art in fashion advertising. While artist collaborations and activations are a familiar concept in fashion, it’s rare that we actually see brands centering a visual artist in such a direct way. But far from distracting from the bags themselves, the approach draws us ineluctably in while deepening MZ Wallace’s status as a cultural force, both within the New York City art world and beyond. And while we live in a world shaped by visual communication, text still has a unique and timeless power to reach out and communicate directly with a reader, seeing them as a creative and curious conversation partner rather than a mere set of eyes to be vapidly advertised at – with Shrigley’s irreverent yet subtly philosophical pop-art ruminations forming a particularly fun and striking example of that power.

Bravely and playfully making a distinct departure from your typical bag campaign, MZ Wallace exemplifies the power of bringing together unique creative voices. Artful, artisanal, and textual, the campaign sends a clever and defiant challenge to the status quo of ad communication. We hope to see other brands follow its lead.