Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 Campaign Gets an Uncanny Director: Jordan Wolfson
Prada has turned to American artist Jordan Wolfson for a Spring/Summer 2026 campaign that looks less like traditional fashion advertising than a controlled glitch. The house has tapped Wolfson to direct a suite of images and video titled “I, I, I, I AM… PRADA,” starring a cast that spans film, music, and runway: British actors Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, and Damson Idris; rapper John Glacier; American actors Levon Hawke and Hunter Schafer; and Chinese model Liu Wen.
The campaign’s central device is disorientation. Prada’s impeccably styled figures are staged beside larger-than-life digital birds and vividly colored, scale-covered forms that read as part creature, part costume, part avatar. In one image, Schafer appears to have tumbled from an office chair, seated on the floor next to a monumental brown bird rendered in crisp, artificial detail. The effect is theatrical but also faintly clinical, as if the scene were a test environment for identity.
That idea is made explicit in the campaign’s spoken language. In the videos, the models deliver a stilted refrain built from “I” and “I am,” a self-declaration that becomes both soundtrack and structure. Prada’s official title borrows that cadence, turning a basic statement of being into a branded mantra.
In a statement published on its website, Prada positioned Wolfson’s role as an “intervention” that “opens ceaseless possibilities” for the label, emphasizing “multiplicities of identity and being” and the capacity for Prada to be “perceived, and re-perceived” through an advertising format that keeps questioning its own conventions.
Wolfson’s selection is consistent with a practice that has long tested the psychological boundaries of spectatorship. Working across VR, photography, and video, he is known for staging encounters that implicate the viewer, often through immersive media and animatronic presences that feel uncomfortably alive. In 2025, he presented an installation at Fondation Beyeler in which two visitors donned VR headsets and experienced themselves from the other participant’s point of view, a literal exchange of perspective that turned looking into a kind of negotiation.
A precedent for Prada’s digital birds can be found in one of Wolfson’s best-known works, “Riverboat song(2017–18),” a 16-channel video installation that debuted at David Zwirner in New York. The piece follows the unsettling actions of anthropomorphic animals, using the familiar language of character and costume to produce something stranger: a world where the viewer’s comfort is always slightly out of reach.
Seen in that context, “I, I, I, I AM… PRADA” reads as more than a celebrity-fronted campaign. It is a collision between luxury fashion’s polished surfaces and an artist’s interest in how images shape, split, and perform the self — with Prada’s clothes acting as both costume and cue.
