Fashion and literature have always shared a fascination with surface and depth. Baudelaire, Wilde, Capote, catalogued fashion details obsessively in their writings, and used clothes to craft an image, a self, a brand.
Rarely has it been, though, that longer-form literature is used as a medium in fashion marketing, whose obvious motive is too flat to be very interesting: to sell clothes.
Albeit so, it’s becoming more common for brands to enlist writers nowadays, the way they do photographers and stylists. Gucci has tapped essayists like Olivia Laing to contribute conceptual depth to its campaigns, and Victorias Secret infamously hired Amanda Gorman for a much-criticized comeback.
For Prada’s SS25 Womenswear campaign, Prada went above and beyond their typical release statement. Prada commissioned Ottessa Moshfegh to write ten short stories to accompany images of Carey Mulligan, shot by Steven Meisel. Ten Protagonists, is a work of commercial literature, a world between fiction and marketing collateral (where, coincidentally, New York is located).
Though not especially ground-breaking, the stories follow a typical marketing consumer profile, each story a brief character sketch, assigning a role—the Translator, the Scientist, the Architect—to explain the Prada Woman.
Moshfegh’s restraint aligns with the campaign’s visual language: elegant, acclaimed, and composed, a kind of glossy minimalism, a further condensing of the commercial genius of Prada.
It feels absurd, not because I’m analyzing a piece of marketing collateral, but because I am compelled to. It’s the age-old exchange of capital for cultural credibility, but with a new tendency towards lesser-used art forms, like literature. Prada, the Medici-like wealthy patron at one end, and literature, the neglected, once-sanct church, at the other.
For me, these alliances are exciting, because they represent a new alchemy, as well as a harbinger, because they seem to mark a point where a piece of fiction commissioned by Prada is more interesting to me than a book on the shelf at McNally Jackson.
Why? Maybe because of the inherent rigor of a commercial commission, Prada’s excellent creative reputation, and the relevance of commercialism itself as a concept in my life. For many of us today—especially those living in cities like New York, and other global centers—commerce isn’t just a backdrop, it’s the whole stage.
A collaboration between a career writer and a brand like Prada doesn’t need to be exceptional or groundbreaking, for it to gesture toward something unsettling: the increasingly selfsame, almost cement-like alliance between corporations and art—which one is dependent on the other for survival?
An entanglement as old and convenient as church and state, that excites and upsets this writer’s brand-obsessed, corporate-influenced conscience.
The stories can be read here.
Text by Marguerite de Ponty
10. MARCH. MMXXV. PLUM
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