Fashion can tell stories of the lives of women, evoke their most intimate and personal narratives. As part of the Spring/Summer 2025 ‘Acts Like Prada’ campaign, starring Carey Mulligan and photographed by Steven Meisel, the acclaimed American author Ottessa Moshfegh, known for her radical depiction of female characters, devises a new series of ten unique texts, each an evocation of these Prada personae. Inspired by Mulligan’s characterisations, each campaign still is expanded, through Moshfegh’s words, into a fully-realised heroine.
The result is Ten Protagonists – a collection of short stories, each titled after the fictional name Moshfegh imagines for each female character and keyed to a particular campaign image. Bound into a limited-edition Prada publication illustrated with the campaign images of Carey Mulligan, these short episodes expand that imagery, the invented selves of each of these female protagonists chronicled through Moshfegh’s words. Stories of women, invented by a woman, literature here is a tool, to add depth and meaning, to enrich experience.
Connecting to Prada’s tradition in pioneering new storytelling methods through campaign and directly following last season’s Miranda July hotline, Ten Protagonists adds a layer of new meaning to the Spring/Summer 2025 Prada campaign images, creating original contemporary literature while expanding the relevance of the images to a dimension beyond the visual.
Ten Protagonists is written by Ottessa Moshfegh and features the Spring/Summer 2025 Prada campaign images of Carey Mulligan, photographed by Steven Meisel with creative direction by Ferdinando Verderi.