On an unseasonably warm day in late February, Barry Jenkins attended his first “real” fashion show. The qualifier he uses – real – might strike fear into the coordinators of any other fashion event he’s attended, but they shouldn’t hold it against him: this was a Prada show, after all. “Being there, it was inspiring to see the way Mrs Prada and Raf [Simons] could create these very concrete metaphors out of shapes and silhouettes,” Jenkins remembers of his first time sitting front row. “The show had a very clear narrative.”

At that AW26 women’s show, 15 models appeared on the catwalk in slimline trenches, embellished coach jackets and zip-up fisherman knits, before reappearing again, each stripping a layer to reveal more clothes beneath. The same 15 models reemerged a total of four times, their careening, directional walks and a thudding, techno soundtrack – Robert Hood’s “Chroma Light” – adding to the forceful determinism of the moment. For the house, it was a “reflection of the multifaceted realities of women and the complexities of life.” For Jenkins, it was an “awesome” experience like no other. “I still have the soundtrack in my head,” he remembers, recounting a tale where he recreated the Prada runway for his infant child. “We have a one year old, and my wife and I took the score from the show and we put it over our kid in the stroller,” he says with a laugh. “The energy of it was so intense and moving.”

As was Jenkins’ experience at the AW26 show, Mrs Prada and Simons soon invited the Moonlight director to capture that season’s campaign. “It was really organic,” he remembers of the proposition. “It wasn’t, ‘hey, we have this thing you have to do’. It was ‘we’re thinking of some things. What do you think?’ And it just took off from there.” And with that, Jenkins joined a long line of directors hand-selected by Mrs Prada to capture the brand’s campaigns over the past 20 years, from Xavier Dolan and Autumn de Wilde to Nicolas Winding Refn and Yang Fudong.

For this AW26 offering, Jenkins’ film inhabits a sparsely decorated stately home, with Chen Haoyu, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Hunter Schafer and Troye Sivan occupying various spaces in the house, moving through rooms, corridors and stairwells, but never crossing paths. While Sivan stares tensely through a window into the grounds, and Haoyu combs her hair with a distant look in her eyes, Schafer tears pages from a book and throws them into a lit fireplace. “I feel like I’m in a cycle, I can’t figure it out,” says Harrison Jr’s voiceover.

“You have to have people who are going to open themselves to you and not be closed off,” says Jenkins on working with the three actors and one actor/musician. “That was really what led the casting process more than how the characters looked – it was about how they felt.” For Jenkins, it was important that the quartet embrace the fashion aspect of the film, but then extend that vision further. “It was about communicating in a way that we can push this past just being models and actually get to something that was a little bit more expressive, a little bit deeper,” he says. “It was really cool to have people who were somewhat comfortable, but actually performing like thespians and not just models.”

When fleshing out the story for the performers, Jenkins looked to Prada’s creative director duo to inform his choices. “What I love about Mrs Prada and Raf, what they’re doing, and what she’s always done, is that it’s not about taking the person who’s going to wear the clothing and forcing them to reconfigure themselves because they’re wearing Prada,” he says. “It’s about, ‘how can you express yourself now that you have chosen these garments?’” In a similar vein, Jenkins wanted the campaign to remain evocative but non-prescriptive, just as he sees the clothes. “I don’t want anyone to watch these images and go, ‘Barry Jenkins is telling you this image means this thing,” he responds, when I ask if there’s a narrative structure to the films he’s made. “So I can’t tell you what story I had in my head, but there was one that I shared with the cast.”

If you’ve already watched Jenkin’s moving Prada short (and Schafer’s own solo film above, premiered exclusively on Dazed), you might be surprised to know that, along with working with Prada for the first time, this is also Jenkin’s first fashion campaign ever. But how did it feel to be approached by such a house for this first outing? “It was surprising!” admits Jenkins. “Because my movies, to this point, they’re not fashion films. They’re sometimes referred to as slow cinema, and you can’t have a fashion campaign that is slow cinema,” he continues, in reference to the need for fashion ads to communicate “very clearly and very quickly.”

But the “slow cinema” tag didn’t scare off Simons and Mrs Prada – they in fact have a long history of allowing auteurs to permeate Prada campaigns with their own signature styles. Take Yorgos Lanthimos for instance, who, in 2025, shot a surreal short for the Galleria Bag featuring a mysterious giant orb and three cloned Scarlett Johanssons; or Wes Anderson in 2013, whose mercurial movie Castello Cavalcanti was essentially an extension of his own filmic universe; or Ridley Scott, who created a chrome-hued, jazz-infused chase through the city with Daria Werbowy in 2005, kicking off Prada’s whole 20 year legacy of film director collaborations.

Jenkins’ latest intervention is yet another entry into this canon. “What was really beautiful about this process was that it wasn’t about me fitting myself into this Prada box. It was ‘we love what you do, and we’d love to see your interpretation of what we do’, concludes the director. “When someone approaches you for a collaboration with that mindset, it wants you to figure out a way to be open and activated.”