PALOMA WOOL SS25: FRAGMENTS OF A FICTIONAL MEMORY

For Spring/Summer 2025, Paloma Wool steps sideways from conventional campaign structure, inviting artist and photographer Fumiko Imano to construct an atmosphere rather than a narrative. The result is a collection of images that feel more like scattered memories than fashion photography—fragile, surreal, and quietly staged.

Known for her intimate self-portraiture and analogue collages, Imano builds a visual space where identity is fluid, moments are doubled, and reality is gently tampered with. This season, that same language is applied to Paloma Wool’s SS25 collection, where clothing appears as an extension of character rather than product—another layer in a carefully constructed fiction.

The campaign features Petra Collins, absorbed into Imano’s world of mirrored gestures, soft interiors, and imperfect symmetry. The scenes feel domestic yet distant—like pages from a family album that never existed, or snapshots from a dream only half recalled. There’s an intentional awkwardness to it all: figures doubled but not quite identical, spaces familiar but somehow off-kilter. It’s this tension between the known and the imagined that gives the campaign its weight.

Nothing is overworked. The garments—loose knits, washed silks, soft tailoring—drift through the images with a natural ease. They are lived-in, unhurried, and grounded in the kind of real-life rhythm Paloma Wool has always embraced. And yet, through Imano’s eye, even the most understated look carries a certain theatricality, a sense of being part of a scene that’s been quietly choreographed.

There is no storyline here, no obvious statement. Instead, the SS25 campaign functions more like a memory exercise: a fragmented visual diary that explores the space between intimacy and invention. Imano’s analog approach—the visible seams, the hand-cut collages, the subtle imperfections—resists the hyper-slick polish of traditional fashion imagery. This is not a campaign that tries to be definitive. It lingers, suggests, and slowly unfolds.

In the world of Paloma Wool, looks are worn more like clues than declarations. And with Imano behind the lens, those clues become part of something deeper—something personal, unstable, and beautifully unresolved.