The beloved singer and rapper Frank Ocean is officially the face of Prada‘s S-S 2020 campaign for the men’s collection, together with actor Austin Butler and director and producer Nicolas Widing Refn. Three men, each one with a strong and incisive personality, each one with the task of introspectively reinterpreting Prada’s universe and male identity.
Frank Ocean had already shown his affinity with the Italian brand. In fact, just at the last Met Gala Themed Camp: Notes on Fashion, Ocean wore a very simple but unexpected sporty Prada quarter-zip.
Photographed by David Sims and conceptualized by Ferdinando Verderi, the Optimistic Rhytm campaign shows for the first time the spring-summer 2020 menswear collection of the Milanese fashion house, which went on the catwalk last June at the Minsheng art wharf, on the Shanghai East Bund and challenges its 3 well-known protagonists to try to define themselves and reflect on their personality, using five words for each that started with the letters p, r, a, d, a.
“The Prada Spring/Summer 2020 menswear campaign features a trinity of contemporary creatives, pivotal cultural personalities of now and archetypes of the hyper fragmented mindset of tomorrow. Each embodies a single identity of the Prada man, one aspect, one outlook, multiplied by each image, each definition. They are representations of the legion individuals that comprise the collective.”
With these words, the brand defines the complexity, typical of the Prada soul, which lies behind the campaign’s concept and it does so by opposing to the monotony of conventionality and of coherence “an intentional display of constant duality, multiplicity, reinvention and renewal“.
Provocation, intellectual dynamism and indefinability are the “Pradese” principles of which Frank Ocean, together with the other two artists, has now become a symbol.
