Zara Studio Collection Fall 2024 Ad Campaign

Review of Zara Studio Collection Fall 2024 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Fabien Baron and Photographer Steven Meisel with models Haojie Qi, Lulu Tenney, Mona Tougaard, Penelope Ternes, and Sascha Rajasalu

Zara explores the spectacle of the fashion image with the new campaign for its Fall 2024 women’s Studio collection, once again created in collaboration with creative director Fabien Baron and photographer Steven Meisel.

The imagery first takes shape through Meisel’s iconic approach to black-and-white studio portraiture, seeing a roster of the moment’s leading models as the epitome of 21st-century glamor in dramatic and angular looks.

The campaign develops through another layer, however, as these portraits are dramatically supersized and placed into a sprawling metropolis as billboards and wild postings. Though we don’t explicitly see any other people – just the contrast of black-and-white image with cityscape and the expanse sky as it fades from day to night – the approach distorts and amplifies the typical tension between viewer and subject, creating a self-referential exploration of the power of the image and its relationship with the built environment.

The epic accompanying short film further pushes this tension between image and external context, between physical reality and digital manipulation. In time with a propulsive and angular electronic soundtrack, the portraits flash across a digital billboard mounted to the bed of a semi truck parked in a desolately beautiful alpine desert landscape. The energy seals the campaign’s success as a visual exploration of tension and contrast.

Fabien Baron continues to do great work in taking the campaigns for Zara’s Studio collections (the brand’s more artisanal offerings led by Karl Templer) to the next level. At once tapping into and subverting the typical relationship of photographer, model, and viewer in a classic fashion image, the campaign is a bold expression of Zara’s push into the contemporary fashion canon.