Prada Creates Smart Celebrity Campaigns

Prada always knows how to choose its men. This season, the men’s spring/summer 2015 campaign features up-and-comers Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Ethan Hawke, and Jack O’Connell. Prada’s selection is certainly timely, as the actors are in honorable films this year and are seen as real thespians, rather than the usual fashion campaign bait: the hypersexual hunk. In this campaign, the actors are photographed by Craig McDean, performing menial tasks—drinking water, jotting down notes, peeling fruit—but look oh, so good.

Prada, which aesthetically seems to teeter between the uncanny and cool, has casted some of fashion’s most unexpected characters in past collections to model from the runway in Milan to its ubiquitous campaigns. Take the label’s fall/winter 2012 collection for example, which culminated with a star-studded clan of actor-models including Gary Oldman, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, and Jamie Bell on a red carpet runway.

Though, it’s not uncommon for fashion brands to use celebrities as models. In fact, this strategy has been going for the last decade or so—from Madonna parading the catwalk in Jean-Paul Gaultier’s spring/summer 1995 collection to Kimye’s make-out campaign for Balmain. Oh, and Justin Bieber’s CK ad gone viral.

Sure, the celebrity sells, but Prada is not exploiting their poster-boys as cash cow commodities. Instead, they select young (and sometimes legendary) talent to represent an artistic vision. We look back at Prada’s handsome celebrity campaigns.