I have always felt uncomfortable around birds. I often trace my repulsion to a family viewing of Hitchcock’s The Birds during my tender years, when anything could feel like a personal reference. In that sense, I may be biased—but when a PR pitched me a preview of Prada’s new Spring/Summer 2026 campaign, I knew immediately I didn’t like it.
Imagine a sterile, minimalist white void that resembles a tabula rasa—a series of white boxes that bring back memories of a nascent collective consciousness where everything feels both new and daunting. Inside that dream-like environment, life-sized digital birds stalk through, alongside celebrities and Gen Z fashion icons such as Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, Jona Glacier , Levon Hawke, Hunter Schafer, and Liu Wen. The supersized birds quietly take the role of mime-like surreal shadows or distorted mirrors of the human figures beside them. A vague murmur, I, I, I, I am…, is played as a backdrop repeatedly throughout the film, an auditory anchor of what it means to exist. Aptly titled I, I, I, I am… (2026), the video campaign is a collaboration with American artist Jordan Wolfson, known for his provocative animatronics that often carry a sense of the uncanny, this time designed to fit a fashion campaign. Under the directorial reign of both Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the campaign is meant to be the second chapter of an ongoing Prada campaign project that aims to explore the today-more-than-pressing questions of identity and the self in a digitally dominated bright new world. Still, in my view, the campaign feels like one of the stranger, more genuinely disquieting things to arrive under a fashion house’s name in recent memory.
Wolfson’s past works are rich in hard, often uncomfortable questions. As critic Emily Colucci wrote reviewing the (Female figure) (2014) installation for Filthy Dreams: “Wolfson’s (Female figure) is experienced with one or two other people (reservations necessary and difficult to obtain), bringing her (its?) existential horror to a personal, intimate level.” Here, though, the surreal birds’ pairing with Prada outfits worn by celebrities against a box-like white void is a recipe for disaster. The oversized birds interact with the models in ways that range from uncanny to funny—but the type of funny that edges closer to embarrassing. There is no reason for them to be there, no sense of visual creative direction that makes these creatures from hell an integral part of any narrative. Unless, of course, this is yet another expression of fashion annexing art in the typical postmodern avant-garde-ish manner, as justification that Prada is indeed the brand of the sophisticated. In contrast to the raw psychological unease of The Birds, or the disquieting intimacy that characterizes Wolfson’s earlier installations, the imagery here aestheticizes tension rather than interrogating it. It is this semantic void that renders the videos almost comical—and I don’t believe they were intended to be.
What remains is a composition that leans heavily on the signifiers of avant-garde experimentation without substantiating them, rendering Prada’s gesture toward artistic collaboration less a critical inquiry and more a hollow performance of cultural sophistication. If fashion continues to seek validation through art, as is increasingly the case today, collaborations need to feel integral, unavoidable, and almost natural. And crafting for the algorithm is never a recipe for that.
