Fashion’s New Creatures

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

Surreal birds turn the Prada Spring 2026 campaign into an encounter rather than a display.

Fashion has always borrowed from fantasy. What feels different now is the way fantasy enters the image. It's no longer confined to styling or atmosphere. It appears as a presence of its own.

In Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 campaign, created with artist Jordan Wolfson, a large bird-like figure leans into the frame. Its size and proximity make it impossible to treat as background. The model, clothes and bag remain visible but the image no longer belongs to them alone. The creature is not there to complete the scene. It changes who the scene is for.

Gucci Fall/Winter 2017 campaign, photographed by Glen Luchford, creative direction by Alessandro Michele.

A World for the Creature

Prada is not the first campaign to place a creature beside the human body. Gucci’s Fall/Winter 2017 campaign offers a vivid earlier example: a Gill-man–inspired figure carries a model through shallow water. The difference lies in the world around them. Gucci builds a cinematic scene for the creature. Prada places its figure inside an otherwise ordinary fashion image. One belongs to a fiction already in progress. The other makes fiction appear without warning.

Have a Puffy Summer

Moncler takes the creature beyond the campaign image. For Have a Puffy Summer, its padded forms become oversized animals across buildings and pop-up spaces. At 10 Corso Como in Milan, an octopus wraps around the façade, carrying the language of the puffer jacket into the street.

A puffy octopus extends across the façade of 10 Corso Como for Moncler Collection Summer 2026.

The creature no longer stays in print, costume or a constructed fantasy world. It now appears beside the body, across the city and within the object itself.

Oversized flowers and reflective figures carry the Bouquet collection’s botanical forms into Gentle Monster pop-ups across six cities worldwide.

The Object as Organism

Gentle Monster removes the creature altogether. In the 2026 Bouquet collection, the frames themselves begin to behave like living forms. Loops and tangled lines gather around the lenses as though the object were still growing.

Beaded botanical forms extend beyond the frame in the Bouquet collection.

The accompanying pop-ups extend the same idea into the room. But the shift begins with the glasses themselves. There is no animal, mascot or character. The object has taken on the creature’s role.