Puppets and Puppets Spring 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Puppets and Puppets Spring 2025 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Carly Mark and Photographer Luca Khouri

Puppets and Puppets interrogates art history with its Spring 2025 campaign. Shot by photographer Luca Khouri, the campaign features brand’s first collection since creative director Carly Mark downsized the brand and relocated to London, almost entirely dropping its clothing and refocusing on accessories.

Despite this significant change, the Puppets and Puppets spirit of irreverently idiosyncratic artistry is more alive than ever. Khouri’s portraits star Mark herself, who enters a dramatic visual dialogue with some of art history’s most famous paintings of women. In a bare room with just a concrete floor and a plastic chair, she engages with the likes of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Wyeth’s Christina’s World, and Courbet’s famously provocative L’Origine du monde, both posing next to them in underwear and a handbag or imitating them with her own body.

While these are famous paintings of women, they were all painted by men. Coupled with Marks’ almost confrontational reclaiming of these artworks, the campaign thus takes on an impactful interrogation of ownership, image, and feminist representation in art. Who gets to paint women? What women get painted? Do women own their own image? These questions become all the more incisive and important coming from an independent woman designer in an industry that is notoriously exploitative.

It’s an impressively weighty theme for such a seemingly simple, accessibly executed campaign. There is no huge budget here: just creativity and a powerful point of view. Puppets and Puppets may be undergoing a transformation, but its elusive and uncompromisingly artistic perspective hasn’t gone anywhere.