August 18, 2026

Developing Chemistry

A look into Dolce&Gabbana’s Fall/Winter 2026 campaign

Steven Meisel turns his lens on what passes between two personalities, for Dolce&Gabbana’s Fall/Winter 2026 campaign.

Dolce&Gabbana’s Fall/Winter 2026 campaign opens on a familiar collaborator: Steven Meisel, back behind the camera for a study of what happens when two people get close enough to change each other. The premise is chemistry, literally: attraction, friction, whatever passes between distinct personalities when they meet, mingle and mesh.

Meisel has spent four decades reading bodies for a living, so his brief here, translating collision into stillness, chemistry into a single frame, is less a departure than home turf.

For women, that means power read through the house’s own dialect: Sicily, black lace, tailoring, sensuality and devotion, delivered with more sincerity tha spectacle. For men, Meisel’s version of contemporary masculinity stays close to the ground, sartorial but unstudied: knitwear, denim, a Mediterranean ease that looks caught rather than composed.

The Meisel-Dolce&Gabbana relationship goes back to the house’s earliest campaigns, decades now of a photographer and a label growing recognisable together, occasionally apart, always circling back. It’s an odd kind of intimacy given how little anyone actually knows about the man behind it. Meisel doesn’t give interviews, is rarely photographed himself, and has spent a career building some of fashion’s most exposed images from behind total anonymity. This year is something of an exception: Photo London has named him Master of Photography for 2026, an honour that comes with a rare public exhibition, a strange event for a man who has made privacy part of the work. Two kinds of visibility, then, arriving in the same year, one campaign, one retrospective, both proof that Meisel’s presence has never required his person.

Which tracks, in a way, with the house’s own instinct this season. Dolce&Gabbana has spent Fall/Winter 2026 insisting that identity is the real subject, not just of the collections but of the label itself, unmistakable for how insistently it changes: refining, expanding, experimenting with the same handful of codes until they feel inevitable again. Recognisable, independent, occasionally elusive. It’s a description that could apply just as easily to the man who photographed it.

images COURTESY
author PRIYAM