You know those strange moving images that send you down endless rabbit holes, always taking you back to where you started but somehow, at the same time, going deeper and deeper inside of them? It’s a clever technique called infinite recursion; the visual embodiment of Caroline Polachek’s “door, to another door, to another door” line. Well, for their Resort 2020 lookbook, Prada have reinvented it in high fashion form.
Starring a coterie of fashion faces — Freja Beha Erichsen, Freek Iven, Qun Ye, Sara Blomqvist Young, Stella Jones, Yang Hao and Kyla Ramsay — their campaign, titled Seditious Simplicity, was shot in two halves with the images later overlapping. Stark black and white portraits by American photographer Drew Vickers sit alongside kinetic street style-inspired shots by Japan’s Keizō Kitajima. In Keizō’s shots, the models brandish bouquets of flowers — daisies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums — wrapped in one of Keizō’s other shots, in which those models are brandishing a bouquet wrapped in one of Drew’s photos. Are you following?
The more you watch, the more it becomes apparent that this stellar line-up of models sits across ten solo images: figures are hidden in amongst them but no-one is holding a photo (or a photo of a photo) of themselves.
It’s like one big gorgeous game of Inception. And now you, too, can own these photos! As part of the campaign’s global roll-out, Prada have given a select few florists — in London, Milan, Moscow, New York, Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo — gigantic, paper print-outs of the shoot to wrap bouquets of flowers in. Now you’re part of the experience too.
Get lost in Prada’s Resort 2020 campaign here.