Stefan Cooke

Review of Stefan Cooke Spring 2024 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Bruce Usher with Photographer Theo Sion with model Piers Rochford

Stefan Cooke paints the poetics of youth, isolation, and queer masculinity with a beautiful and brilliant Spring 2024 campaign by creative director Bruce Usher and photographer Theo Sion.

Sion shoots in (mostly) black and white, capturing model Piers Rochford in striking compositions before the beautiful decay of a corrugated-steel structure in the process of slowly collapsing into its scrubby landscape. Yet what dominates the images are the massive foam fingers interposed between the young man and this setting, against which their vibrant colors and cartoonish lines thrillingly clash. Shirtless with culottes and studded derbies (a classically Stefan Cooke subversion of British men’s dressing), his long and lithe form sculpturally flows against these garish shapes, long hair obscuring his face, all of it evoking the passions, isolation, and friction of growing up as a young queer man.

The foam finger is already an iconic oversized emblem of athletic spectatorship and exaggerated masculine bravado. By blowing it up to a far greater size than usual and using striking color juxtaposition to emphasize the out-of-placeness of this strangely abstract man-made object in an otherwise poetic world of intimacy, isolation, and decay, the imagery embodies the spirit of subversion and sensitivity at the heart of Stefan Cooke’s vision. Before this hyper-graphic and hyperbolic symbol of herd mentality and machismo, our dainty protagonist feels even more lissomely elegant and individual, in conversation with expectations of masculinity but setting himself apart from them.

Immediately striking yet allegorically complex, the imagery is a beautiful statement of Stefan Cooke’s rethinking of modern masculinity.