Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 Campaign Hands the Camera to Jordan Wolfson — and Lets the Avatars In
Prada has turned its Spring/Summer 2026 advertising over to American artist Jordan Wolfson, a figure best known for video and sculptural works that test viewers’ tolerance for unease. The resulting campaign, titled “I, I, I, I AM… PRADA.”, swaps fashion’s usual polish for a cool, digitally inflected disquiet: models and actors pose beside outsized birds that read as both glamorous props and faintly predatory presences.
The still images feature a roster that includes Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, Damson Idris, and Hunter Schafer. Each appears in close proximity to the birds, which look computer-generated or heavily computer-altered, their surfaces unnaturally slick and their scale deliberately wrong. The effect is less whimsical than uncanny, as if the campaign’s cast has stepped into a world where the supporting characters are not quite under human control.
Prada’s rollout also includes a short moving-image work that the brand bills as Wolfson’s first video project since “Riverboat Song” (2017–18), the acclaimed piece that helped cement his reputation for psychologically charged, technologically mediated storytelling. In the new film, the models speak with a flat, almost automated cadence, repeating the word “I” several times before arriving at “I am” — language that doubles as the campaign’s title and its conceptual hinge.
As the words land, the birds begin to shift and circle with slow deliberation. In Schafer’s segment, the campaign leans hardest into Wolfson’s signature strangeness: a bird-man hybrid, wearing black leather boots, raises its hands behind her in a gesture that feels both theatrical and threatening. The creature stares outward, breathing audibly, while Schafer smiles brightly, seemingly unaware of what is happening at her back.
Wolfson’s involvement is notable not only for the imagery but for the artist’s history. His work has repeatedly staged scenarios of physical and emotional violence. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, he presented a VR piece in which visitors witnessed a man being beaten by a version of Wolfson wielding a baseball bat. More recently, he produced a VR work for the Fondation Beyeler, outside Basel, Switzerland, that abruptly “body-swapped” participants — a disorienting maneuver that arrived with little warning.
Prada, in a statement accompanying the campaign, framed Wolfson’s contribution as an opening onto “ceaseless possibilities, multiplicities of identity and being, of what Prada can be, how it can be perceived, and re-perceived, through constantly-questioned conventions of an advertising campaign.” The language positions the project within a familiar fashion-world argument: that the ad campaign can function as a site for experimentation, not merely product display.
The collaboration also lands amid a broader, increasingly competitive courtship between luxury brands and contemporary artists. In recent years, labels including Dior and Louis Vuitton have enlisted artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Cosima von Bonin, Tyler Mitchell, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Julien Nguyen, and Isabella Ducrot for runway environments, special projects, and image-making. The trend has prompted ongoing debate about whether fashion patronage expands artistic possibility or absorbs it into brand storytelling — a question Art in America’s Emily Watlington sharpened in 2024 when she asked whether fashion is supporting the arts or subsuming them.
With “I, I, I, I AM… PRADA.”, Prada appears to be betting that Wolfson’s unsettling digital theater will not be softened by the collaboration. Instead, the campaign leans into the artist’s preoccupation with avatars, performance, and the uneasy gap between a human face and a manufactured presence — a gap that, here, is filled by birds that look ready to step out of the frame.
