The Man Who Speaks Prada
It’s a fast-moving runway season with new designers at Chanel and Dior, among other houses, and in Milan last week, Miuccia Prada and her co–creative director, Raf Simons, seized the moment to be more contrarian than usual. Their show opened with two ordinary work uniforms, like the kind UPS drivers wear, before the clothing shapes began to break up and recompose themselves into new forms. A top that suggested a bra was a mere flutter of fabric and certainly useless as a bra. More curious still was a soft knee-length skirt suspended from the shoulders on two long, thin straps. Although Prada and Simons added underlayers, like bras and uniform shirts, the cut of the skirt nonetheless left a large void at the center of the body. The designers said an aim was to move away from the sculptural aspect of high fashion and make styles that can shift and adapt, but to some critics, they had removed the clothes, too. The show, in the best Prada tradition, divided opinion.
But how will people feel about the collections a few months from now, when the shows have been forgotten and they’re just looking for something new to wear? And how will brands communicate the intentions of their designers? The answer is through ad campaigns. It’s the nebulous part of the business of selling desire, one that insiders don’t find nearly as interesting as the runway drama and that the non-fashion world doesn’t even know exists.
These days, a luxury ad campaign must accomplish a difficult task. How do you show the meaning of the clothes in an image-saturated world and connect with an audience that is technologically fast but also wants authenticity from brands? You hire a creative director — these days, preferably one who comes up with ideas, not images.
Leo Premutico met Ferdinando Verderi in 2006, when a friend introduced them at a bar in New York. Premutico, then a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, the British advertising agency, grew up in Australia. As a teenager, he said, “I just fell in love with ideas and concepts and distilling things down to something simple.” At the bar, Premutico felt he had met a kindred spirit, someone else who loved parsing ideas. But even more attractive was Verderi’s background.
Born in Parma, Italy, Verderi received a classical education — Greek, Latin, philosophy. Mastering Greek is a useful skill for a creative person since the language is all mental puzzles because of the multiple meanings of each word. It teaches a person to stay open, and Verderi was open. In college, he studied economics out of a youthful zeal to test himself. He actually disliked economics. He preferred creative things — image-making, magazines — and spent his spare time researching them. He lived in Nuremberg, Germany, for a year, knowing little about the culture or the city except that it was near the childhood home of the fashion photographer Juergen Teller, whose work he admired. When Verderi met Premutico, he was 28 and staying on friends’ sofas. He was supporting himself working for a former professor back in Italy, teaching sailing, and writing a book, The Challenge of Photography to the Contemporary Art Market, based on his thesis. At that point, he was on a path to become an academic, but he didn’t want to be a thinker only. He wanted to be a maker of something, though he didn’t aspire to go into advertising.
“He had this incredible curiosity and knowledge, but he really questioned whether he could turn it into something real,” Premutico said. “He wasn’t an expert in any programs or methods to be able to express or show his ideas. Also, and he’ll probably be the first to say this, the industry he was interested in is one that can be very exclusive.” That industry was fashion.
A year later, when Premutico and a partner, Jan Jacobs, decided to open their own agency, Johannes Leonardo, in New York, they asked Verderi to join them as a founding member. It was a moment of enormous change in advertising because of social media, which was turning consumers themselves into a powerful medium to share a brand’s message. That brought an avant-garde energy to advertising as companies like Coca-Cola and Google — future clients of the agency — wanted progressive ideas. To the partners, it made sense to hire someone with a nontraditional background, Premutico said. Still, Verderi worked at the agency eight years before his first fashion campaign. Brands were wary of a lack of experience in fashion and his style of ideas. Then, in 2015, Adidas Originals, the lifestyle unit of the shoemaker, hired the agency to refresh the cultural relevance of its Superstar sneaker. The campaign was so successful the agency was asked to do a follow-up, and Verderi proposed a collaboration with Alexander Wang.
From early on, Verderi believed a good campaign imparts a simple, timely truth about a brand or a culture. In 2016, a big topic of conversation was how street fashion was stealing from luxury — literally. Fakes were everywhere. He felt the campaign would be more authentic to sneaker kids, and more disruptive, if it boldly used the emblems of counterfeit culture. When Wang’s team printed actual cease-and-desist orders on T-shirts, Verderi put those T-shirts at center stage in the campaign. Jenny Pham, the former Adidas marketing lead who worked with him, recalls his directive: “Everything we do, we have to do it wrong.” Instead of a pop-up in a cool downtown location, the team members erected one from the back of a truck — parked in front of Louis Vuitton on 57th Street. Instead of nice packaging, they used garbage bags. “We did everything ‘wrong,’” Pham told me. Even the photos, by Teller, were run upside down at Verderi’s urging.
The campaign got a lot of press. Not long after, Donatella Versace hired Verderi independently, and not long after that, he left the agency to go out on his own. For one of his most memorable videos, he embraced a well-known truth about the Italian house: Everyone says the name differently. He had a dozen supermodels each intone, “Versace, Versace, Versace,” then he ran Bach underneath to create a clash. In 2019, he began directing Prada’s campaigns, a job he still performs today. That same year, he was appointed creative director of Italian Vogue, where the late editor Franca Sozzani had established a reputation for brilliant photography. Verderi challenged many of the industry’s assumptions. Why can’t an issue be entirely illustrated? How can you make a magazine personal, indeed relevant, in a digital world? One way he answered was to make an issue with a hundred unique covers shot by one photographer, then have each person featured tell their life story in under a minute. The videos ran on the magazine’s Instagram. “I really wanted it to be a conversation,” Verderi said. “What is beauty today? Is it a picture, or is it the story behind the picture?”
One reason Verderi attracted the notice of the industry was timing. Most fashion ads were being created by people who’d gotten their start in magazines or graphic design. They had an understanding of aesthetics, of what made a good image. That system worked extremely well for a century — until the last decade or so, when fashion brands belatedly grasped that aesthetics weren’t important anymore, not in the phone age. It was fluency with the digital world — and few traditional art directors had it. But Verderi, coming from advertising, did.
With many brands, you get images that often feel interchangeable and, lately, tinged with nostalgia. Unlike traditional art directors, Verderi is not after a look or a mood. He may be the first fashion art director in history whose primary concern is not the image. Instead, it is to come up with an idea that is so clear it can express a designer’s intentions on many levels and at the same time be understood by a child. “I think Ferdi was the first person who understood that his work had to be communicated to a younger audience who had already grown up not looking at magazines,” said the photographer David Sims. “It’s not good enough anymore to just do a beautiful image. We used to advocate beauty over truth in fashion. That’s all it was — just fantasy, fantasy. And Ferdi doesn’t issue that stuff. He’s coming at you with the sense that not only does that image have to engage and entertain but it also has to give a purpose to the people who are seeing it. It’s not just the photograph. It’s the moving image, the content for social media. He covers all that territory, and he covered it before anyone else.”
Verderi’s first Prada campaign, in 2019, appeared on paper wrapped around flowers distributed to several hundred florists and some delis in big cities. That season, Miuccia Prada embraced humble fabrics in sweet tones, and Verderi wanted to show the brand’s connection with the real world. “So how do you do that without saying that? Let’s actually try to do a campaign that you stumble on, not one that you need to look for,” he said. “Where do you find it? You find it at the intersection of everyday life.” With people inspired to share their Prada bouquets, the campaign went viral, and more than one company even asked if he would do the same campaign for them. (He said “no.”)
When Simons joined Prada as co-creative director in 2020, Verderi wanted to convey that conversation is at the center of the brand, without a single point of view. He positioned hundreds of automated cameras to photograph the models from 360 degrees and then abstracted the millions of views into close-ups for the campaign. The resulting images contained questions, and the public was invited to respond online with their replies compiled in a book.
“It’s always about allowing the audience to be part of it in some way,” Henrietta Hitchcock, who works on Verderi’s London-based team, told me. And it’s as close as a luxury brand can get to challenging its own top-down strictures.
Verderi strives for a campaign with multiple layers of meaning. “Feels Like Prada,” for the fall 2021 collection, conveyed the notion that Prada is more than what you see. The collection was full of tactile patterns, and Verderi, along with the designers, proposed having buildings around the world digitally covered with fabric-inspired patterns. The concept celebrated the importance of touch after COVID and defied the industry’s fear of using taglines. “Fashion is allergic to words,” Verderi said, explaining that it tends to distrust communication aimed at your brain and not your gut. He says he came up with the line while brainstorming with a friend he’d worked with on some Google campaigns. “Mrs. Prada loves words as a territory, and Raf was very keen on having a tagline,” Verderi said. “It felt like something coming from a different industry.”
In the summer of 2024, the “Miranda July Hotline” campaign appeared. It had an 800 number that people could call to talk to the novelist and filmmaker or, anyway, a recording of her voice. Still, July, who had just published All Fours, sounded amazingly actual from the moment she said “Hello … ?” She wrote and recorded the dialogue, which was activated by responses from callers. “It was like a conceptual-art thing,” said July, who added that it reminded her of the artist John Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem, launched in 1969. According to Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, as cited in the Times, Dial-a-Poem “brought poetry and the museum out in the world, and disseminated something in an unprecedented way.” That, in essence, is what the hotline ad did with fashion.
Then, early this year, Prada came out with a campaign called “Acts Like Prada,” featuring Carey Mulligan as various performative characters. It was accompanied by a book of stories called Ten Protagonists, by the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, that Verderi had commissioned. As Kenneth Richard, founder of The Impression, a fashion-news site, observed, most brands hire actors and don’t give them a script. “If you look at 99.9 percent of the celebrity talent, they have no words. If it’s a TV commercial, then it’s the celebrity walking through a palace in a slip dress, right? Ferdi is saying, ‘Let’s shoot them as characters … because that’s what the talent does.’”
Verderi’s ascent has raised the gall of some in fashion. Another art director said, “He represents a new direction that is social-media-driven, gimmicky, conceptual, and can create a lot of noise and buzz, which is very different from my approach, which is about beautiful image-making.” And Teller, who has worked with Verderi on shoots, said, “He’s someone who desperately wants to be in this world of fashion.” The animus was surprising, and it may be just another indication of the shift between old and new ways of communicating a brand’s message. “I think it’s always threatening to people when somebody represents a paradigm shift,” the British editor Jefferson Hack told me. “Because they don’t understand how he does what he does at the scale and speed that he does it. That probably puts a bee in their bonnet.”
When I told Verderi I wanted to write about him, he said I could observe anything except calls with clients. We met first in Brooklyn, at a photo studio, then in Milan for the Prada men’s show, followed by several days in London. Verderi is a warm, energetic, yet curiously ethereal presence. Just over six feet tall with a loose build, a patchy beard, and long, middle-parted brown hair, he suggests an apostle. He played basketball as a teenager in Parma (his coach, a profound influence, was Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, who played in the Italian leagues before she became a WNBA star). And there’s little evidence of an ego. Talking about the difference between Verderi and other art directors, the photographer Oliver Hadlee Pearch said, “He doesn’t care about the photographer. I’ve worked with a lot of people who want to be the photographer’s best friend. They want to make you happy. He doesn’t want to make you happy. He wants to fulfill his vision. We are in a game of ego, and I think a lot of people get ruffled by that in the sense of, Why am I not the center stage? But he makes something far bigger, and if you’re part of something far bigger, you make a thing that lasts longer than a fashion shoot.”
Verderi believes a campaign should be based on a solid thought so the message can be fragmented in many ways, across different media. For example, in 2023, he did a campaign for Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with the artist Yayoi Kusama, known for her dots. His idea was that instead of a brand using a famous artist to help sell products, the artist would use the brand to take over the world, covering everything — taxis to buildings — with her art. He even proposed covering all of LVMH’s group advertising with dots. (Vuitton said “no” to that plan.) But coming up with clear concepts takes work, and it begins by brainstorming with his team and calls to a network of longtime associates who work outside fashion.
Because Verderi isn’t after a look or an image, he, in contrast to most art directors, never uses a mood board. “We start from a very abstract point,” he said. “We don’t really look at images. We just think and talk. The thing that is dangerous, for me, is to start with a mood, not an idea. It’s really hard for me to look at something that’s already been done.”
This came into focus for me when I first visited his office in a modern building in East London. Seated around a conference table in the middle of an otherwise empty room were about ten youngish colleagues. There were no cubicles, no photos on the walls. It was a place dedicated to talk. I’d seen the same setup in Brooklyn. Most of the same people sat at a long table, laptops open. Because Verderi holds shoots in different cities, having the team move like a nomadic camp is a way to keep everyone together in real time. In London, I observed a brainstorming session for a proposed project for a client that, after a slow start and some gentle prodding from Verderi, got to a discussion of digital twins. (The project ultimately didn’t go anywhere.) One regular freelancer on the video session later told me she’s into cypher-punk and bitcoin. “I’m very deep into new decentralized systems,” she said somewhat mysteriously. “Ferdi is the only art director I work for.”
The pace is intense and can seem chaotic, and Verderi admits his employee turnover is high. Hitchcock told me that young art directors coming from traditional agencies often find it difficult to work outside a prescribed context. “There’s this almost rigid way of thinking about creative direction, any kind of creativity,” she said. “You’ll jump on a call with Ferdi to discuss something, and he’ll go, ‘Yeah, but why? What does that mean? Why are we doing this? What’s happening here?’ There’s nothing ever in a deck that hasn’t been thought through.”
Verderi said, “Probably my biggest conversation with the team when they present me things is ‘What’s the idea?’ First, is there an idea here, and second, can you actually explain it? If you can explain it, then maybe we can distill it.” Later he said, “To actually resolve something and to not leave it there, where it’s everything and nothing, you need discipline. It’s difficult. You have to be really honest with yourself. Like, is it actually true what I’m saying?”
With Prada, Verderi first sees a collection at the show. He usually has an intuitive response and then takes a couple of weeks to develop his thoughts and discuss with his team before going back to Prada and Simons.
Prada told me, “He finds many, many different positions. He’s prolific.” Simons agreed: “He’s going to come with 15 things. And every one of those 15 ideas is well explained, well visualized. And he has always a reason for the things he’s proposing. So there is a huge spectrum of things that can then lead maybe to another thing.”
Simons continued, “There are art directors who sometimes just come with some imagery, and I think that Ferdi works more like we do. He starts with conversation, and out of that can come imagery. Not the other way round.”
One day in the London office, Verderi had his laptop open as we looked at things he had proposed for Stone Island, an Italian brand known for its technical fabrics and obsessive clientele, as well as for Vuitton’s Kusama collaboration. It was astonishing to me how many novel ideas he produced for these campaigns, many of which were never executed. For example, for Kusama, he had proposed a global “therapy program” based on her personal relationship to art. He’d also suggested buying up ad space in her hometown in Japan, and using it to display “thank you” messages from fans around the world.
The clients liked the ideas, but for any number of reasons — budget, timing — they didn’t go forward with them. Verderi doesn’t mind a surplus. “The thing about a lot of ideas is not just to give a lot of ideas,” he said. “It’s mostly because, when we turn up our motor, ideas come.”
I asked a question I’d been dying to ask. Chanel, the greatest name in fashion, has a new designer: Matthieu Blazy, who makes his debut October 6. If Verderi were the house’s art director, where would he begin?
“I would go back to the orphanage,” he said. Gabrielle Chanel, who changed how women dressed, was put in an orphanage from around age 12 to 18. “I would look for the tension that started everything. I would try to understand what she was pushing against, as if there were nothing between now and then.”
The day after Prada’s women’s show, Verderi and I talked about his first impressions for the campaign in the bar of his Milan hotel. Sometime soon he’ll be presenting ideas to Prada and Simons. In his view, he said, the show was “trying to question what a fashion designer has to do today to add to the conversation. And it feels to me that they really did their job properly in the sense that the collection is divisive and it’s a progression conversion.” Since the mid-’90s, Prada has led the industry by challenging the status quo (at that time, it was the dueling power identities of women offered by Gianni Versace and Giorgio Armani, among others). Simons, in Antwerp, was developing his influential view of men’s dress with the skinny black suit. And Verderi, in Parma, was beginning to explore and question the world of image-making, a world he would one day influence. None was formally trained in their fields. All brought radical ideas.
Verderi once said that courage lies behind many of our strongest emotional attachments, to people as well as brands: “You are attracted to someone who has the courage to ignore the context and just believe that what they’re doing is right.” The comment seems to sum up his whole way of thinking, even as far back as the early days in New York before he ever got into advertising.
At the bar, he mentioned one of the final looks in the show, the suspended yellow skirt over a flimsy black bra and pair of bloomers, and said, “It’s literally hanging by a thread and really challenging even the utility of clothes. You can criticize it as much as you want, but there is so much negative space — more negative space than fabric — and still you have the idea of a dress. And it’s so sensual in a way.” So negative space is one very abstract idea for a campaign he’s developing. He laughed. “I’m thinking of holes.”