Prada says it with flowers in latest resort campaign

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Nov 17, 2019

 For her spring resort campaign for her fashion house, Miuccia Prada has decided to say it with flowers. Quite literally.
 
Leave it to the ever iconoclastic Miuccia to dream up a novel new strategy for her house’s Resort 2020 campaign – which debarked last night not on the pages of any magazine or in laptops or iPhones, but instead on paper images wrapped around bouquets of flowers.

 
The imagery features double-page broadsheet photos of quirkily handsome and beautiful models marching around central London – one side black and white portraits of the cast; the other low angled color shots of the same models and outfits. In the latter, the models carry bouquets of flowers wrapped in the actual ad, along with new resort  collection, handbags and computer satchels. The blooms include yellow sunflowers and ruby Celosia argentea, commonly known as silver cockscomb. Even if Shakespeare wrote cockscomb as coxcomb, and meant a vain and conceited man, as in Twelfth Night.
 
Art photographer Drew Vickers shot the direct portraits. Keizo Kitajima of Japan lensed the color images, harnessing his dynamic realist character, a street style first developed back in the seventies, and seen powerfully in this shot, staged in and around Somerset House.

Florists in major cities like London, Milan, Moscow, New York, Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo, and “points unexpected, unknown, unanticipated…. filled with beauty, romance, poetry and stories,” will participate in this campaign, according to the house.
 
Entitled Seditious Simplicity, techy videos of the campaign actually show some models speaking from the wrapped paper; with models announcing “The Prada  2020 resort campaign will preview in flower stores around the world. Look for it at your local flower shop!”
 
The house termed the novel approach “a celebration of the preciousness of the everyday, an expression of the style of life, a piece of now.” Designed to avoid a “static distanced image viewed through the lens of the page or the computer screen, the Prada 2020 Resort campaign is integrated into everyday life, subverting convention by breaking down those barriers.”
 
Miuccia’s latest cruise campaign stars both very known and emerging runway stars: Freja Beha Erichsen, Sara Blomqvist, Lexi Boling, Yang Hao, Stella Jones, Xiao Wen Ju, Xara Maria, Freek Men, Vik Nahishakiye, Ashley Radjarame, Kyla Ramsay, Toni Smith and Qun Y.