Jordan Wolfson’s New Prada Campaign Turns the Fashion Film Into a Psychological Double
Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 campaign arrives with an unexpected co-star: the unnerving, high-gloss alter egos of Los Angeles–based artist Jordan Wolfson (b. 1980). Titled “I, I, I, I, am… Prada,” the project folds Wolfson’s signature animatronic and digital sensibility into an 80-second video and a suite of still images directed by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons.
Rather than treating art as a decorative overlay, the campaign gives Wolfson’s interventions narrative weight. Two distinct figures appear alongside Prada’s models and actors, posing and gesturing with a choreography that feels intimate, intrusive, and oddly tender. One resembles a full-body suit surfaced with armadillo-like scales. The other reads as a birdman: a towering presence with a beak that recalls the one attached to Wolfson’s “Female Figure,” the scantily clad animatronic that drew intense attention when it appeared at David Zwirner in 2014.
Both characters are rendered in computer-molded leather that shifts color to echo the styling around them: silver-green against gray, teal against pink, black against black. Prada has framed Wolfson’s references as emerging from “contemporaneous culture and our image saturated society,” a description that invites quick associations, from gimp suits to 3D character models, and even to the pop-culture silhouette of Michael Keaton’s Birdman. But the campaign’s mood is less quotation than psychological theater: a play between inner and outer selves, where a double shadows the subject, mimics them, and makes contact without acknowledgment.
The video’s vignettes are spare and pointed. Actor Nicholas Hoult sits on a swivel chair, half-turned toward the camera, while a giant black bird sits cross-legged behind him. Model Liu Wen lies on the floor in moss-green gloves as the scaled bodysuit figure bicycle-kicks beside her. In the closing sequence, actor Carey Mulligan reclines with a Bonnie bag within reach as a giant pink bird in thigh-high leather boots rests behind her, placing its hands first on her shoulders and then on her head. Mulligan delivers the campaign’s refrain with a flat, almost clinical calm: “I, I, I, I, am…,” she says.
For Wolfson, the collaboration marks a return to video after several years. The artist, born in New York and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, rose to prominence in the 2010s with works spanning video, sculpture, and animatronics that probe the collision of technology, violence, and pop culture. His 2017–18 work “Riverboat Song” was widely described as riotous and unsettling, while “Real Violence,” a VR piece shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, proved sharply divisive for its depiction of a brutal beating. More recently, Wolfson debuted “Little Room” at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in summer 2025.
Prada’s campaign does not attempt to soften that history. Instead, it borrows Wolfson’s ability to make spectatorship feel unstable: the sense that what you are watching is also watching you back. In the context of luxury advertising, where images are engineered to be frictionless, “I, I, I, I, am… Prada” introduces a deliberate disturbance — a reminder that identity can be performed, duplicated, and quietly commandeered.
The result is a fashion film that behaves less like a commercial and more like a short, disquieting encounter: a polished surface with a second presence moving just behind it, close enough to touch.
