Prada picked a pencil over a prompt for its holiday campaign
Through it all, Prada proves that real creativity and craft still exist.
While some creatives (hmmm) choose to fall into the loops of AI and soon realize that not everything is so green, Prada proves that sometimes (mostly) using AI for creative work is practically being lazy/not willing to put in the necessary work.
But on the opposite, the 2026 holiday campaign, titled “Drawing Prada”, was created with the anachronistic (the power of this word, adding to the lexicon!) technique of hand-drawn illustration. That instance opened a larger conversation for us around AI and its usage in the fashion sphere and the creative sphere as well by other brands and creatives. The main question is how far can one justify AI usage for the sake of creative work? Or did we run out of ideas or accounts to watch for? So many questions, but that justification Rolodex is not bringing any viable reason to use AI for creative work when you can have real people who put much time and effort into their craft, like Prada or Hermes. But what do we know? Maybe it’s just the “testing” level of things. Only time will tell…
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