Prada’s Fall/Winter 2026 campaign, titled Simple Stories, places brand ambassadors Troye Sivan, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Hunter Schafer, and Chen Haoyu inside a series of intimate and ambiguous scenes that present the menswear and womenswear collections through everyday actions that gradually take on emotional weight, with domestic interiors, restrained performances, and brief narrative clues encouraging viewers to imagine what happened before each image and what may follow. The campaign examines how people communicate through posture, expression, and clothing, giving small gestures close attention and letting each one guide the atmosphere of the frame.
The Director
Prada tapped Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, to direct the campaign, giving him an open brief built around conversation and creative discovery. Jenkins approached the production with the methods he uses in narrative cinema, concentrating on character, physical behaviour, and the information carried by the clothes. Sivan appears near the wide windows of a countryside villa, stepping beyond the interior as the scene opens toward the surrounding space. At the same time, Harrison Jr. provides the short film’s limited dialogue, bringing a human voice into sequences largely guided by image and sound. The result sits closer to a short film than a conventional fashion campaign, which is precisely what happens when you give a filmmaker of Jenkins’ calibre a genuine creative mandate rather than a product brief.
The Clothes as Character
Prada gives the Fall/Winter 2026 collection an active role within the film; silhouette and fabric help establish mood, while the way each piece falls on the body changes the character of an action, with the clothes carrying information that dialogue leaves unexplained and connecting the private scenes to the wider campaign concept. It is a campaign that trusts the audience to do some of the work, and given who made it, that trust is well placed.
