Fashion Campaigns Are Getting Good Again (And It’s About Time)

There was a stretch not so long ago when fashion campaigns felt like waiting rooms. Beige ones. You’d scroll past them, glance at a famous face draped in something allegedly directional, and move on with your life unchanged. No spark. No curiosity. No sense that clothes—or the people imagining them—had anything urgent to say.

And then something shifted.

After the Great Designer Reshuffle of 2025, a phrase that already sounds like it deserves its own Netflix docuseries narrated by someone whispering reverently, a new generation of creative directors stepped into freshly vacated offices, inherited cavernous ateliers, and did something quietly radical: they remembered that fashion advertising is allowed to be weird again.

Not “we hired a celebrity and lit them nicely” weird. Real weird. Thoughtful weird. “Why is this happening and why do I kind of love it?” weird.

This year’s early campaigns don’t feel like content obligations. They feel like points of view. Like someone argued in a room and won.

The Long, Boring Hangover of Safe Fashion

To appreciate why this moment feels so refreshing, it helps to remember just how flat fashion marketing had become. For years, campaigns followed a dependable script:

1. Cast a celebrity with broad name recognition.

2. Dress them in current-season product.

3. Shoot them against a neutral backdrop.

4. Add a tagline about empowerment, heritage, or “the future.”

5. Call it a day.

The result was a sea of images that technically worked but emotionally evaporated on contact. They were pleasant. Polished. Utterly forgettable. Fashion, an industry built on provocation and fantasy, reduced itself to LinkedIn headshots with better tailoring.

This wasn’t entirely the fault of designers or photographers. Social media rewarded familiarity. Luxury conglomerates rewarded consistency. Risk became something you justified in quarterly decks rather than embraced in creative meetings.

And yet—here we are.

Venice, Mysticism, and the Return of Texture

When Bottega Veneta unveiled its new campaign under creative director Louise Trotter, it didn’t scream for attention. It murmured. Seductively.

Shot in Venice, the images lean into a kind of New Age glamour that feels refreshingly unbothered by trends. Feathered coats brush against ancient stone. Studded heels stand confidently on water-worn steps. The brand’s signature Intrecciato bags don’t beg for validation; they simply exist, as if they’ve always belonged there.

What makes the campaign work isn’t just the clothes—it’s the confidence. There’s no frantic energy, no algorithm-chasing desperation. It trusts the viewer to linger. To notice. To feel the weight of tradition without suffocating under it.

In a cultural moment obsessed with speed, this kind of visual patience reads as rebellious.

When Absurdity Becomes a Feature, Not a Bug

Then there’s Jonathan Anderson, who appears to be having a genuinely excellent time. Still steering his namesake label while carrying the institutional gravitas that comes with his expanded role at Dior, Anderson’s latest imagery feels like someone gave him permission to follow his strangest instincts—and he sprinted.

The campaign features familiar fashion-world faces like Tim Blanks alongside pop royalty Kylie Minogue, all styled in scenes that wobble gleefully between the ridiculous and the sublime. Taxi-cab-laden dresses. Pitchforks. Nautical totes emblazoned with words that feel like they wandered in from a different genre entirely.

The result looks like the curated hoard of an eccentric aunt who lives by the sea, drinks martinis at noon, and has opinions about everything. And somehow, that’s exactly the point.

Fashion doesn’t need to be aspirational in the old, glossy sense. Sometimes it just needs to be specific.

Juergen Teller, Making Out, and the Art of Not Explaining Yourself

If there’s one photographer whose fingerprints are all over this creative renaissance, it’s Juergen Teller. Known for his confrontational intimacy and refusal to polish away humanity, Teller has been everywhere lately—and that’s very much a compliment.

His work for Moncler’s collaboration with Rick Owens is the kind of campaign that would have given corporate risk managers hives five years ago. The images feature Teller and Owens, along with their partners Dovile Drizyte and Michèle Lamy, kissing one another in various configurations.

The brand describes it as a celebration of love, passion, and human connection. Which is true—but also beside the point. The real power of the images is that they refuse to over-explain themselves. They’re intimate without being sentimental. Provocative without being cynical.

They feel lived-in. Which is increasingly rare.

Prada and the Joy of Meta-Playfulness

Not to be outdone, Prada went delightfully cerebral with a campaign composed entirely of photos of photos, held by unseen hands. It’s a visual loop that gently pokes at our obsession with documentation, perspective, and authorship.

Who is looking? Who is holding? Who is framing whom?

It’s playful without being smug. Smart without being exclusionary. A reminder that fashion can think—and still look good doing it.

Guess, Y2K Nostalgia, and Weaponized Ambivalence

And then there’s Guess, staging a low-key takeover of Los Angeles with billboards that feel like they were plucked straight from a parallel 2003. Shot on iPhone 5c’s for a deliberately grainy effect, the campaign features local “It” girls sucking on lollipops and gazing into the middle distance like they’re bored with the concept of desire itself.

The copy is ambivalent to the point of poetry:
“What do I want? idk … Guess.”

It’s nostalgia without preciousness. Irony without cruelty. And yes, it’s hard not to notice how effectively it distracts from last year’s uncomfortable conversation about automation and authenticity in advertising. Memory, after all, is one of the most powerful tools fashion has.

Why This Moment Matters More Than It Seems

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a cyclical correction. Fashion gets dull, then gets interesting again. Rinse, repeat.

But this moment feels different.

For one thing, the risks feel intentional rather than reactive. These campaigns aren’t flailing for virality. They’re not begging to be screenshotted. They’re building worlds and trusting audiences to step inside them.

For another, they reflect a broader cultural fatigue with polish-for-polish’s sake. We’ve spent years living through curated feeds, algorithmic recommendations, and content optimized into oblivion. The hunger now is for texture. For specificity. For something that feels chosen rather than tested.

Fashion campaigns, at their best, don’t just sell clothes. They offer permission slips—for fantasy, for contradiction, for being a little strange in public.

The Quiet Return of Creative Authority

There’s also something refreshing about seeing creative directors reclaim authority over brand narratives. For a while, fashion advertising felt like it was being designed by consensus: marketing teams, data analysts, legal departments all smoothing away edges until nothing sharp remained.

What we’re seeing now is the result of leaders willing to stake their reputations on taste rather than metrics. Leaders who understand that not everyone has to like something for it to matter.

That’s how fashion regains its pulse.

What Comes Next

If this momentum holds, we may be entering a period where fashion campaigns once again become cultural artifacts rather than background noise. Where you remember an image not because it was everywhere, but because it lodged itself somewhere inconvenient in your brain.

That doesn’t mean every campaign will work. Some will misfire. Some will confuse. Some will prompt heated group chats that begin with “I don’t get it, but…”

Good. That’s a sign of life.

Fashion doesn’t need to be universally understood. It needs to be felt.

And right now, after years of beige safety and celebrity autopilot, it finally is again.