Alongside four other global stars, Benedict Cumberbatch takes the lead role in the Prada Fall Winter 2023 campaign, brought to life through the metaphor of flowers.
Beauty, care, love, these are some of the qualities that flowers symbolise. For its Fall Winter 2023 campaign, Prada explores these eternal, timeless values by reimagining the metaphor of flowers – both totems and gestures of tenderness and affection – to human size, a scale that suggests otherworldly emotions. In the campaign, flowers interact with five global stars – Benedict Cumberbatch, Hunter Schafer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Letitia Wright and Li Xian – a roster of cinematic idols reflecting Prada’s long-standing relationship with cinema as an expression of cultural ideas and ideals.
These renowned figures possess a mastery of their craft, enabling them to evoke these emotions through still and motion imagery, using words, actions, and even glances. The campaign showcases an enchanting sequence of surreal conversations between the figures and flowers, creating a dialogue that is both literal and visual.
“Flowers themselves are ageless symbols of a beauty between the everyday and the extraordinary – in and of themselves can be seen as conduits of emotion, physical expressions of the intangible,” Prada emphasises. Their resonance transcends cultures and language. In this campaign, due to their scale, flowers also assume the role of protagonists. Captured through Willy Vanderperre’s imagery, each blown-up flower faces a different celebrity, engaging in exchanges and dialogues, both visually and literally, as showcased in the accompanying campaign films. The cast engages in conversations with these improbable blooms, scripted by Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours (1998).
Just as the conversations themselves are paradoxical, flowers embody a dichotomy, simultaneously fragile and strong, precious and ordinary, ephemeral yet eternal. Each flower is unique, serving as a metaphor for humanity—an outer expression of our thoughts and feelings. Through this campaign, Prada establishes a synergy between flowers and the embodiment of the human experience, where the implicit becomes tangible. Real emotions are evoked through these seemingly unreal images.
