Fashion Week Type

Some letters shouldn't come out of a font menu. For the Spring/Summer 2023 season, from Milan to Paris, we made a series of visuals for five names that need no introduction and made every headline by hand: poured, melted, inflated and scratched until each word looked like it belonged to the clothes, not to a keyboard. It was an experiment with one rule. Nothing a typeface could do was allowed to do the work.

GraphicLetteringArt directionMotion

Services provided

01Handmade display lettering
02Art direction
03Editorial layout and typography
04Billboard design
05Motion design

2022/2023

Prada has spent more than a century making intelligence look effortless. Founded in Milan in 1913 and shaped for decades by Miuccia Prada, now with Raf Simons beside her, it is the house that made nylon serious and turned "ugly chic" into a compliment. Its Spring/Summer 2023 show, in Milan on 22 September 2022, was built on duality and paradox, so the letters got the same treatment. P-R-A-D-A became soft porcelain forms, heavy and weightless at once, resting on the horizon like clouds that learned to read.

BALENCIAGA in pink and green liquid chrome across a model in a black cape and dark glasses.

YEEZY in melted silver letters over a grainy black and white image, with a barcode, a scribbled signature and the line Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga.

Christian Dior is said to have called Cristóbal Balenciaga "the master of us all". Since the house opened in Paris in 1937 it has redrawn the silhouette more than once, and under Demna it learned to make the street look like couture and couture look like a provocation. For Spring/Summer 2023 we gave the name a skin of liquid chrome, pink and green, as if it had been poured over the coat and left to set. For Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga, the house's meeting with the street, the same metal went black and white: melted letters, a barcode, and a signature scrawled across the frame on the way out.

A model in a navy sweater and pleated grey skirt sits on a concrete pier with her feet in the sea, under the word PRADA in soft, inflated white letters.

Schiaparelli is where fashion and art stopped pretending to be strangers. Elsa Schiaparelli opened in Paris in 1927, put a lobster on a dress with Salvador Dalí and invented a pink loud enough to be called shocking. Under Daniel Roseberry the house is back at the center of haute couture, still surreal, still gilded, still happy to put an eye where you don't expect one. Our visual takes Carlijn Jacobs' portrait of Saskia de Brauw and runs the name down the side in melted blue, with white lines scribbled over it like notes in the margin of a dream.

A Bottega Veneta billboard on a street in Milan, shown twice, with a woman walking past.

BOTTEGA in cut-out letters filled with Botticelli paintings beside a model in black, with a black chrome script across the frame.

Bottega Veneta was founded in Vicenza in 1966 and became famous for not shouting: woven intrecciato leather and a motto, "When your own initials are enough." Quiet luxury before anyone called it that. So the billboard got to be loud on its behalf. BOTTEGA is cut out of the frame and filled with Botticelli, Venus and Primavera on loan from Florence, while a black chrome script runs across the model like ink that hasn't dried. Five houses, five ways of writing a name, and not one of them available as a download.

Photography belongs to the houses and their photographers. Prada Spring/Summer 2023 campaign: David Sims. Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga campaign: Kristina Nagel. Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta: courtesy of the houses. Schiaparelli: Saskia de Brauw, photographed by Carlijn Jacobs, styled by Jacob Kjeldgaard, wearing Schiaparelli Ready-to-Wear Fall/Winter 2022/2023. Lettering and layouts by Fjaka.