Blauer's SS26 Campaign Is Not About Clothes
When it comes to a fashion line, is it weird to say that clothes come second? To posit that the very garments which many have dedicated their lives to designing, creating, modelling, marketing, selling, and styling might actually be trumped in importance by something more vital, more integral to the business of living? For SS26, Blauer has done exactly that.
The brand’s latest campaign, shot by the legendary Bruce Weber in New York State’s Montauk, is less about the clothes themselves and more about the lives of those wearing them. What the clothes allow for—the movement they permit—is central. To some extent, this has always been part of the brand’s DNA: from the beginning, Blauer has been an expert in creating all-purpose uniforms for civil personnel.
SS26 Women's
Weber pinpoints the central idea here as adventure. For him, “exploration is a journey that leads me to the hidden lives of others. Adventure is useful to the extent that it brings me closer to stories inaccessible to others. The moments described are nothing more than attempts at connection in a disconnected world.”
The campaign brings together a seemingly disparate cast of people with whom Weber has previously worked, weaving storylines across borders, decades, and walks of life. There’s Danilo Lo Monaco, for example, principal dancer of the Czech National Ballet in Prague, or Rachel Harty, a poet as well as a model (“I love to have a poet around,” Weber says, “because they manage to convey such sensitivity in every photograph I take of them”).
A particularly striking aspect of the images and film is their sense of family. As seen through Blauer and Weber’s eyes, this is not a family forged through blood ties, but through looser, more incidental bonds: shared stories, places, values; perhaps simply curiosity and humanity. Black and white here reads more as nostalgia than moodiness; these are images full of sun-drenched optimism.
As for the clothes themselves, they ooze timelessness. Just as the garments allow Weber’s subjects to move freely, roaming Long Island’s Montauk with the most laissez-faire attitude, so too could the images be lifted and transposed into almost any decade of the 20th century. Straight denim, spring jackets, some varsity-adjacent shirting—clothes that feel lived-in, unforced, and enduring.
SS26 Men's
And yet there’s no sense of anachronism. Despite its insistence on longer-form video and black-and-white photography—not by any means a TikTok-geared campaign—Blauer has hit upon the zeitgeist. Coolness today stems from effortlessness and expansiveness: the feeling you get when you meet someone with a messy bag full of the day’s supplies and a dead phone. Here, Blauer chooses experience over aesthetic. These are, truly, the clothes of adventure.
Wanna get curious? Check out Blauer's full SS26 collection here.
