Fashion’s New Creatures

Fashion imagery is no longer satisfied with beauty alone. It now wants a certain strangeness within the frame: something that observes beauty, accompanies it, and sometimes even disrupts it.

In Prada’s Spring 2026 imagery with Jordan Wolfson, surreal birds turn the campaign into something stranger: part theatre, part dream logic, part digital encounter.

Fashion has always borrowed from fantasy but something different is happening now. The fantasy is no longer hidden in styling, lighting or atmosphere. It enters the frame as a character.

Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 imagery, created in collaboration with artist Jordan Wolfson, belongs to this shift. A large pink bird-like creature leans into the scene with its head tilted, occupying the image with a presence too strong to feel decorative and too deliberate to feel accidental.

The model, the clothes and the bag are all there, but the image does not revolve around them in the usual way. The creature changes the balance. It becomes a kind of emotional centre: curious, awkward, theatrical and slightly unsettling.

This is where the creature becomes more than a visual effect. It does not explain the clothes, nor does it simply make the campaign more memorable. It interrupts the polished surface of the image and turns it into something closer to an encounter.

Perhaps this is one of the directions fashion imagery is moving toward: not louder, not necessarily more futuristic, but more inhabited. Less campaign, more scene.

Beyond Prada: From Motif to Presence

Fashion has not suddenly discovered creatures. Animals, mascots and illustrated characters have long lived on clothes, bags and accessories. What feels different now is their role within the image. They are no longer only motifs, charms or collaborations; they appear as presences, performers and interruptions.

Loewe: The Crafted Creature

For its Spring/Summer 2026 Precollection, Loewe turns to Louis Wain, the British artist known for his eccentric depictions of cats. His feline figures move through the collection as intarsia, embroidery, print, trompe l’oeil knit, charms and sculptural accessories, bringing his strange, humorous world into the language of craft.

Loewe’s cats mostly live on the object: the bag, the knit, the shoe, the packaging. But they matter here because they show how a character can carry more than decoration. Through Wain, the creature becomes a bridge between illustration, eccentricity and handwork. It turns the collection into a small visual world, where craft is animated by personality.

Moncler: The Inflated Creature

Moncler’s Summer 2026 “Have a Puffy Summer” campaign takes the idea of the creature out of the image and into the city. Supersized puffer mascots, including an octopus, whale, seahorse, crab, lobster and flamingo, appear across global installations and pop-up spaces, from 10 Corso Como in Milan to Seoul and other cities.

Here, the creature becomes architecture, installation and spectacle. The octopus that wraps itself around a building makes Moncler’s puffy language physical at an urban scale. In this way, fashion no longer only presents a collection. It builds a world around it, sometimes large enough to walk into.

Gentle Monster: The Object as Organism

Gentle Monster’s 2026 Bouquet Collection moves in a more abstract direction. It allows the object itself to become almost alive. The frames are shaped by loops, tangles and knots drawn from botanical structures, turning eyewear into something sculptural and organic.

To mark the collection, Gentle Monster also opens pop-up spaces across six cities worldwide. This detail matters: the idea does not remain only on the face or in the product image. It expands into an environment, allowing the botanical language of the collection to become something visitors can physically enter.