There are fashion campaigns, and then there are gestures. For its Summer 2025 campaign, Saint Laurent, under the sharp and instinctive direction of Anthony Vaccarello, delivers the latter. In place of the usual flash and spectacle, the French fashion house hands over its seasonal narrative to the brush of Francesco Clemente, whose portraits do not shout, but murmur.
Rendered with a softness that carries weight, Francesco Clemente’s work captures Zoë Kravitz, Isabella Ferrari, Penelope Ternes, and Ajus Samuel not as models or muses, but as apparitions—figures suspended in time, each holding their own myth. There’s no clear boundary here between sitter and symbol, subject and emotion. Faces emerge as topographies of light and memory, while color becomes a kind of internal monologue.
Francesco Clemente, who has long traversed the spiritual and the sensual, oriental and occidental, lends the campaign a gravity that feels earned. His portraits, shaped by decades of intimate wanderings and collaborations with icons like Warhol, Ginsberg, and Cuarón, lend the collection something more than context: a soul. This isn’t about clothes. It’s about presence.
For Anthony Vaccarello, whose work consistently blurs past and future, this collaboration is less an aesthetic choice than a philosophical one. The clothes — reduced, precise, draped with quiet confidence — don’t fight the canvas. They echo it. It’s a rare moment when a fashion house willingly steps into the background to let art lead, and an even rarer one when the result is this resonant.
In a world obsessed with immediacy, Saint Laurent chooses contemplation. Summer 2025 campaign doesn’t arrive with noise, it arrives like a whisper you can’t forget.
