Prada reminded us how to draw

Every animator knows the sound of a pencil on paper that has been punched along the top edge. The holes are there so the sheets can sit on pegs, one over another, each drawing a fraction different from the last. It's slow work, and for most of the last thirty years it has been the kind of slowness the advertising industry was designed to get rid of.

This autumn Prada paid for a great deal of it.

What Prada actually made

The house's Holiday 2026 campaign is called Drawing Prada, subtitled Animated by Hand. It places five actors, Chen Haoyu, Maya Hawke, Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Luther Ford, inside hand-drawn winter worlds populated by animated animals. Glen Luchford photographed and directed the live action. The animation was led by John Pomeroy, a veteran of hand-drawn feature animation. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are credited as creative directors, with Ferdinando Verderi on campaign creative direction. Prada released the stills and films alongside a behind-the-scenes piece showing how the drawings were made.

That's the part everyone agrees on. What it means depends on who you ask, and the gap is the most interesting thing about it.

What's on screen

The film runs to under a minute, according to Campaign, and works less like a story than a set of small encounters. Maya Hawke, in a red dress, walks through a snowy wood with a drawn fox at her heels. Three mice make off with Sadie Sink's shoes, a reissue of a dalmatian-print loafer Prada first made in 1995. A snow lynx stalks the bag Chen Haoyu is carrying. Rabbits and bats busy themselves with Luther Ford's leather accessories. (WWD; DesignRush)

Notice what each scene is about. Not the clothes, exactly, but desire for them: every animal wants something one of the humans has. It's the oldest structure in fashion advertising, the object of envy, played as a storybook. The drawings make the wanting gentle and funny rather than aspirational, and the product sits inside the joke instead of on a plinth. It is also, quietly, a very precise piece of merchandising: a shoe, a bag, leather goods, each given its own small animal and its own beat.

What Prada says, and what it doesn't

Prada's own language is notably restrained. It calls the campaign "a celebration of craft and process". In its announcement it describes "a Prada fantasy created by hand, an experiment in craft", and elsewhere refers to "the anachronistic technique of hand-drawn illustration". According to Inc., the release also connects the sense of touch to "a fundamental notion of humanity".

What Prada does not say, in anything we could find, is "AI". There is no manifesto, no swipe at generated imagery, no claim to be taking a stand.

What the press heard

The coverage was less restrained. Inc. framed the campaign as a rebuke to "AI slop". Other outlets read it as a deliberate turn away from synthetic visuals at the moment they are flooding the holiday season. It's a reasonable reading. It is also the audience's reading, not the brand's.

That distinction is worth more than a footnote, because it shows how positioning actually works now. Prada didn't have to make the argument. It chose a method, described the method in the vocabulary of craft, and let the context supply the rest. The word "anachronistic" is doing quiet, careful work: it admits the technique is out of its time without saying which time it's out of. Readers filled in the blank themselves.

A brand that had said it was making an anti-AI campaign would have looked defensive, and dated by spring. A brand that simply drew everything by hand, at great expense, in the season of generated everything, looks confident. The meaning is the same. The posture is completely different.

Why the method reads as a message

The reason this works is not nostalgia. Audiences don't respond to hand-drawn animation only because it reminds them of the films they grew up with. They respond because it makes decisions visible. Every line in a drawing is a choice somebody made and could have made differently. Looking at it, you sense the labour without needing to be told about it.

That is exactly what generated imagery tends to lose. Not quality (it can be very beautiful) but evidence of judgement. When people say an image feels human, they rarely mean it's imperfect. They mean someone was clearly deciding.

It would be lazy, and wrong, to turn this into a war between pencils and machines. Plenty of good studios use AI well: for research, for testing ideas quickly, for the administrative drudgery that eats the hours around the actual work. The tool isn't the problem. The problem is surrendering the process to it, letting the first plausible output stand in for an idea, so that what you publish is finished but undecided. Prada's campaign is a useful reminder of what the opposite looks like, not a ruling on which tools are allowed.

What a smaller brand can take from it

Certainly not the budget, and not the look. Copying hand-drawn animation because Prada did it would be the most machine-like move available: the plausible output, minus the reason.

What transfers is a principle. Put one visibly human decision at the centre of the work. A lettered price card instead of a template. Product photographed on a real table in real light. One drawn mark on the packaging. A behind-the-scenes post that shows the rejected options as well as the chosen one. It doesn't need to be the whole campaign. It needs to be unmistakably made.

And describe your method, not your enemy. Prada talked about craft and process and let the moment do the rest. A small label that says "no AI" is defining itself by what it isn't. A small label that shows how it makes things is defining itself by what it is. Only one of those is still a brand idea in two years.

The holes along the top

The pegs, the punched paper, the pencil that has to draw the same animal a few hundred times, each time a little further into its stride: these used to be the invisible part of animation. Nobody was meant to think about them.

Prada's campaign is interesting because, for once, the invisible part is the point. Whatever you use to make your work, keep somewhere in it a place where a person had to do the slow thing, and let it show.

We help brands decide which parts of their work should be made by hand, and how to show it. See [creative direction](/capabilities/creative-direction).