Hunter Schafer, Nicholas Hoult and Carey Mulligan Star in Prada’s Latest Campaign

Images courtesy of Prada

Prada’s Spring/Summer 26 campaign, ‘Image on an Image’ insists on materiality through the use of multilayered images created by American visual artist Anne Collier with photography from Oliver Hadlee Pearch. The images feature a cast of personalities: actors Nicholas Hoult, Levon Hawke, Damson Idris, Carey Mulligan and Hunter Schafer, the musician John Glacier, and the model Liu Wen.

The fashion brand, under the creative direction of its founder Miuccia Prada, has always used fashion as a lens through which to interrogate the culture around it. In this campaign, we’re asked to really pay attention to the layers of images before us and see them reveal their own construction, rendering the act of looking deliberate once more.

The images engage us and we with them. A bright orange surface is the backdrop to the campaign photographs held gingerly by hands, bare and gloved, framing each one and asking for consideration. Some of the subjects appear to look directly at us – or is it the one holding the images? – while others peer beyond the frame. The gaze can be traced and questioned, over and over again.

The images appear more like art objects than another fashion campaign. By drawing attention to the construction of the visuals, the process of image-making is revealed and the artificiality of the fashion campaign as a medium highlighted. At a time when so many images are forgettable or easily consumable, Prada is asking us to pause, look, and consider.