How Prada Brought Its Hand-Drawn Holiday Campaign to Life

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have a way of finding a new idea in something we already know. At their latest Milan Fashion Week show, they did so with the skirt, pulled apart and reimagined through shifts in fabric and proportion. For Prada’s 2026 holiday campaign, the human hand takes the lead in a series of films and images where hand-drawn illustrations turn winter scenes into a fairy tale.

The brand’s holiday story has a distinctly old-school hand behind it. The house tapped animator John Pomeroy to set its stars—actors Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Chen Haoyu, Luther Ford, and Kelvin Harrison Jr.—inside a world of hand-drawn winter fantasy. Every frame was drawn by hand, a painstaking approach that is something of a lost art in the age of CGI. Pomeroy knows the form well: His credits include the films Thumbelina, The Land Before Time, and Klaus.

The artist began the process by crafting characters from the “inside out,” as he put it. That meant imagining the characters’ wants and whims, like the Snow Lynx eyeing a mini Avoir handbag or a group of mice captivated by a pair of black-and-white dotted shoes. Lighting played a pivotal role, no better exemplified than by the glowing embers of a fireplace cozily illuminating the scene where Sink appears.

Each movement was rendered by hand, including the launching of a snowball into Harrison Jr.’s nylon backpack. From there, the creatures were placed into live-action scenes, where photographer Glen Luchford’s lighting and perspective echo the hand-drawn scenes and complement the brand’s winter collection full of technical outerwear, candy-colored stripes, and occasion-ready knitwear.

The campaign celebrates the art of illustration and reminds us that even pure fantasy is made by humans.

“Animation speaks into stories like live action can’t,” Pomeroy says. “It’s a whole different universe. There’s a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that’s to see that there’s value in the human touch. And that hand-drawn and handcrafted work is still alive in the world today.”