Isla Johnston, wet hair: the most common gimmick in fashion photography since the invention of water. Water, that conceptual fig leaf that turns any model into a siren for exhausted art directors. The black leather jacket with its “impeccable cut” evokes an unzipped diving suit. But above all, what boldness! Because in 2026, we are still discovering that leather can resemble neoprene, and we now eagerly await the revelation that cotton looks like cotton.

The tiled set suggests a swimming pool or a public shower, flirting with the fantasy of the municipal spa in the middle of the Epstein affair. It looks like an ad for a premium mutual insurance company dreaming of being Helmut Newton. Something to sink to the bottom over, though deep down, we’re not that stupid.

The American designers, in their dialect of marketing self-hypnosis, describe the images as “confident, playful, bright and positive”. The corporate quadrature of the circle: four interchangeable adjectives that all mean “we have nothing to say, but we say it with confidence.”

Loewe tells its story as if Merleau-Ponty had taken ketamine in a photo studio in Ibiza to study phenomenology. It’s a campaign that mostly talks about itself, its network, its references, its pedigree, and the pedigree of the pedigree. The clothes become extras in a film about the sociology of cool, because here we are sold a wet girl in leather in front of tiles as if it were a certified philosophical statement, an advertisement for high-end boredom. Wrapped in the vocabulary of a biennale catalogue, why not, but truly, in what world, Vuitton!

FM