Prada’s Holiday Campaign Blends Animation with Maya Hawke’s Wry Charm
Drawing Prada marries hand drawn illustration with live action, casting Maya Hawke and an unmoved fox in a campaign that finds humour in the juxtaposition of haute couture and nature's indifference.
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The intersection of animation and fashion film has rarely felt quite so knowing. Prada’s Holiday 2026 campaign, titled Drawing Prada, unfolds as a conversation between the meticulously real and the whimsically illustrated, with Maya Hawke at its centre and a resolutely unimpressed fox as its most compelling co star.
The campaign emerges from the creative vision of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, with photographer and director Glen Luchford bringing the live elements to luminous life. What distinguishes Drawing Prada from the expected seasonal fare is its playful collision of mediums: hand drawn illustrations, rendered with a decorative fluency by animator John Pomeroy, weave through sequences of real action, creating a visual language that feels contemporary without abandoning the warmth of artifice. The campaign creative direction by Ferdinando Verderi orchestrates these elements into something approaching narrative, though one that resists easy sentiment.
Hawke, serving as Prada Ambassador, moves through this hybrid world with the kind of ease that suggests she understands the private joke at the campaign’s heart. Her presence among the drawn elements and live set pieces brings a human grace to proceedings, yet it is the fox’s studied indifference that anchors the entire endeavour. The animal’s refusal to perform, its quiet resistance to the aestheticised world surrounding it, becomes the campaign’s most incisive commentary: luxury, after all, exists not in the approval of beasts, but in the conviction of those who wear it.
The visual language speaks to Prada’s enduring capacity to mine irony without cruelty, to present beauty alongside something closer to doubt. The drawing aesthetic softens the season’s commercial imperative while the live action insists on the tactile reality of fabric, skin, light. Together they propose a holiday campaign that thinks, that observes, that refuses the purely sentimental in favour of something more complex and generative.
Drawing Prada arrives at a moment when seasonal campaigns often default to maximalism or nostalgia. Instead, Miuccia and Raf have chosen a path that acknowledges the absurdity of selling desire through images, and then proceeds with elegant intelligence anyway. The fox, we might say, approves through its magnificent lack of approval.
Imagery courtesy of Prada (@prada).