Prada’s Days of Summer 2026 campaign features Bella Hadid, Damson Idris, Louis Partridge, and Liu Wen photographed by David Sims across metropolitan islands, individual oases, and contradictory landscapes within cityscapes, where sand stretches across New York rooftops and the city grid remains visible just beyond the frame. The creative direction by Ferdinando Verderi keeps the tension between beach and city deliberately unresolved. Each cast member is photographed alone rather than in a group, reinforcing the idea of private escapes carved out within shared urban environments, with bodies and clothes closely tied to the sand’s contours, while the city remains clearly visible at the edges of the frame.
The Cast and the Wardrobe
The wardrobe follows the same logic of contradiction as the setting, combining metropolitan polish with straightforward swimwear codes, mixing tailored skirts and sharp T-shirts with bikini tops, breezy Bermuda shorts, printed linens, canvas mini dresses, and easy accessories like leather tote bags, sunglasses, caps, and bucket bags.
Bella Hadid stretches across dunes floating above the rooftops, the skyline at her back. Damson Idris and Louis Partridge occupy their own corners of the same invented landscape. Liu Wen completes a cast that gives the campaign four distinct personalities without making any of them perform for each other.
Why It Works
The campaign brings summer sand to New York City, where plains of sand cover skyscrapers and the often blistering urban heat is offset by the calm purity of an imagined beach, and the idea only works because Prada commits to it completely rather than treating the surrealism as a joke. Under the direction of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the campaign captures the brand’s signature combination of the classic and the new, transforming the idea of city and beach into a surreal landscape where the contrast between the two stays present rather than being resolved into easy fantasy. It is a campaign that trusts its own premise, which is the thing that separates Prada’s best work from everything imitating it.
