In State of the Art, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas untangles the crossover between fashion and art.

Poll a film bro on their favorite filmmakers, and you’re almost guaranteed to hear names like Barry Jenkins or Nicolas Winding Refn, Wong Kar Wai or Wes Anderson. These directors’ output — Drive, Moonlight, In the Mood for Love, Moonrise Kingdom, to name just a few hits — is fodder for many a Letterboxd top-four lists. 

Poll Miuccia Prada on her filmic faves, and you’re likely to hear her list of these same names, which tracks. The iconic fashion designer has always had top-tier taste in film (and frankly, art more generally). Prada itself is proof. 

The luxury house’s Fall/Winter 2026 campaign features a short film and images of “scenes from life,” as directed by Jenkins and starring actors Chen Haoyu, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Hunter Schafer, and Troye Sivan. 

The Jenkins connection is just the latest in a longstanding string of collaborations between beloved directors and the Italian fashion house. The Soggettiva program at Milan’s Fondazione Prada museum has invited filmmakers to curate film series for years, with everyone from Pedro Almodóvar to Ava DuVernay participating.

Fashion and cinema have always been close bedfellows. Designers have made film costumes for over a century, beginning with Paul Poiret’s work on Queen Elizabeth in 1912. And some, like Tom Ford, have even sat in the director’s chair themselves. 

Prada’s cinematic roots run deep and wide, touching on everything from food to film stars. Heroes like Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland, currently act as the face of the Prada Paradigme scent. And conversely, the fashion house has also been known to dabble in onscreen depictions of evil as a storytelling device: its famous FW12 menswear show, which became known as “The Villains” collection, featured military-inspired clothes worn by some of Hollywood’s most iconic anti-heroes, including Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, and Jamie Bell.  

In 2024, Prada even partnered with Wong Kar Wai — perhaps Hong Kong’s greatest auteur — on a capsule collection tied to his TV series Blossoms Shanghai in 2024, releasing four Prada looks worn by the series’ star, Ma Yili, onscreen. A year later, the brand opened Mi Shang, a fine dining restaurant in Shanghai designed by Wong (an echo of Bar Luca, its Wes Anderson-designed Milanese cafe). 

Theatricality is a fitting format for Miuccia to dabble in, considering she spent five years studying mime at Milan’s prestigious Piccolo Teatro and has made everything from art and architecture to literature key facets of both Prada and its sister label, Miu Miu, which now operates an entire book club series. 

Prada has been incorporating culture into its ethos for decades; it was actor John Malkovich’s starring role in Prada's 1995 menswear campaigns that helped to shift fashion campaigns away from mere model-focused fare and towards a more intellectualized, cultural position. 

The FW26 campaign’s press release notes that “in a Prada vision of cinema, the clothes here become another character, another focus.” This new Jenkins-directed campaign is just another notch in Miuccia’s reputation as fashion’s premier film nerd. May we live in the Prada version of cinema forever.

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