KATERINA PARRI
Yorgos Lanthimos brings his surreal vision to PRADA’s latest campaign, starring Scarlett Johansson. Their first collaboration feels less like advertising and more like a cinematic reverie, infused with the filmmaker’s unmistakable Greek Weird Wave aesthetic.
Johansson, a long-time face of PRADA, returns for her third campaign with the iconic Galleria handbag. Yet this time, under Lanthimos’s direction, the story unfolds as a short film titled Ritual Identities. Drawing on the surreal language of his cinema, the film blurs the lines between fashion and storytelling.
In it, Johansson transforms into three distinct personas: a woman whispering spell recipes, another wandering through a metropolis in search of their elusive ingredients-each one carefully gathered into the Galleria-and, finally, a third incarnation, born from a gleaming metallic sphere. According to PRADA, the narrative not only reflects the Galleria’s many transformations over the years and seasons but also probes the fluidity of identity itself, ever-shifting, multiple, and open to reinvention.
“This Prada campaign is truly the result of Yorgos’s unique vision and the magic that happens between us as artists. The performance-the collaboration-is open-ended. It’s this process of discovery that makes every creative partnership special,” Johansson told WWD.
