Prada releases its Pre-Fall 2020 campaign ‘Painted in Prada’, featuring Freja Beha Erichsen. Olivier Rizzo styled the shoot with creative direction from Ferdinando Verderi. Fashion photographer David Sims is behind the lens for the original images photographed in London on February, 13 2020.

The campaign is “engineered to react to a changed world, reflecting a fusion of the human hand and eye with technology - each equally important, a hybrid means of communication, expression and creativity,” writes the Prada website.

David Sims’ black and white images of Freja Beha Erichsen act as monochrome canvasses for a subsequent intervention, creative expression via saturated color, applied with improvised spontaneity over the image. The silhouettes of the clothes, their seams and patterns, become ‘paint by numbers’ frames for energetic explorations of color – a dozen Prada-ist shades of Celeste blue, pink, yellow, orange, green and more. The campaign films propose another twist, transforming the model into the maker: Beha Erichsen determines her own image, her own authorship, brushing color onto her clothes and accessories in a surrealist gesture, simultaneously bringing them and her to life. These films will also give life to a multi-layered narrative through digital portals and the Prada Instagram. via Prada website

At a moment where our experience of society and culture is defined by the picture plane - computers, phones, television and magazine pages - with people at a remove from one another, this campaign takes inspiration from the accidental, the imperfection of handcraft and the unfinished nature of human interaction. Blurring lines between the photographic and the painterly, between technology and humanity, it is a subconscious echo of our moment. The joy of color via the joy of technology - both a means of communicating a message, immediately. Ultimately, that message is positivity - a fantasy, painted in Prada colors.