Review of Prada Spring 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons with Creative Direction by Ferdinando Verderi, Photography by Anne Collier with images by Oliver Hadlee Pearch, featuring John Glacier, Levon Hawke, Nicholas Hoult, Damson Idris, Carey Mulligan, Hunter Schafer, and Liu Wen
There’s something quietly disarming about the Spring 2026 campaign from Prada. It doesn’t announce itself with volume. It doesn’t rush to explain. Instead, it places us inside the act of looking, quite literally. Guided by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, with creative direction by Ferdinando Verderi, the house continues its long-standing fascination with perception, authorship, and the mechanics of image-making. The hook here is deceptively simple: you think you’re holding the image. That assumption becomes the concept.
Photographed by Anne Collier, with Oliver Hadlee Pearch’s imagery held and re-presented within the frame, the campaign invites us into the act of looking itself. Hands emerge from the margins, holding photographs of Prada looks, worn by a cast that includes Carey Mulligan, Hunter Schafer, Liu Wen, Nicholas Hoult, Damson Idris, Levon Hawke, and John Glacier. The models recline on grass, on textured carpets, against jewel-toned backdrops, scenes that already feel tactile, slowed, and considered. Then the frame pulls back. We’re reminded that what we’re seeing is an object, something held, admired, examined. Physicality becomes the story.
This sleight of hand does more than feel clever. It creates presence. By adopting the familiar perspective of holding a photograph, the campaign collapses distance between viewer and image. We’re conditioned to scroll, to consume fashion imagery frictionlessly. Here, Prada introduces resistance. The photograph asks to be handled, not skimmed. The analog gesture feels intentional in a moment dominated by digital excess. It distributes easily online, yet resists behaving like content. That tension sits at the heart of the campaign’s power.
Notably, the absence of overt logos sharpens the point. Prada’s design language carries the recognition load on its own. The bags, quietly marked, serve as a nod for anyone still orienting themselves. For everyone else, the codes are already legible. This is insider language, fluent and unbothered. The confidence reads clearly. The orange backdrop, lifted from the season’s runway environment, anchors the imagery inside the broader Spring narrative without spelling it out. Continuity replaces repetition.
What Prada does best, again, is ask us to think while we look. The campaign reflects on advertising without parodying it. It treats fashion imagery as both subject and object, admired and interrogated at once. Collier’s long-standing interest in the politics of looking finds a natural partner in a house that has spent decades questioning how meaning is constructed. The result feels less like a campaign and more like a proposition: slow down, notice the frame, consider your own position inside it.
If fashion advertising is often about desire at a distance, Prada’s Spring 2026 campaign closes the gap. You’re already holding it. Or at least, you believe you are.
Prada Creative Directors | Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons
Creative Director | Ferdinando Verderi
Photographer | Anne Collier, with images by Oliver Hadlee Pearch
Talent | John Glacier, Levon Hawke, Nicholas Hoult, Damson Idris, Carey Mulligan, Hunter Schafer, Liu Wen