Bad Bunny Proves Zara Can Look Like Luxury
No recent fashion collab is bigger or more divisive than Bad Bunny x Zara. From the moment the singer stepped into the Super Bowl Halftime show in February decked out in a monochromatic white Zara fit, the internet was divided over how to react to one of the world’s biggest artists – and a famous humanitarian – repping fast fashion on one of America’s biggest stages. But when he again wore another bespoke Zara fit to the Met Gala, it became clear something bigger was cooking — and it wasn’t just his skin, covered in all those layers of prosthetic that made Bad Bunny into Old Bunny.
Turns out the slow-simmering teasers were in service of a buffet-level feast: Zara released a massive 150-piece “Benito Antonio” collection on Wednesday, named for Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (Mr. Bunny’s government name) and featuring some of his closest collaborators. The clothing — a mix of preppy basics, streetwear, and more upscale tailoring — was designed by Zara, Ocasio, and his longtime creative director, Janthony Oliveras, while the sunny, Puerto Rico-set campaign was directed and shot by his go-to videographer and photographer, STILLZ.
The production is slick yet approachable, epitomizing Zara’s broader strategy to shed its fast-fashion image and present itself as a more “respectable” clothing label.
Yes, Zara's been hard at work rehabbing its look with astutely refined visuals that make it look far fancier than it actually is, absorbing the trends of the day into a creative language equally grounded and aspirational.
Its website is packed with pictures of enviably suave young people clad in of-the-moment gear, but the presentation isn't so elegant that it feels removed. Zara is capably showcasing this stuff in a way that makes it feel of a piece with today's best clothing brands: Real and wearable, quietly cool and obviously tasteful.
Zara is making it clear that it has zero interest in looking like a fast-fashion brand. It instead aims to look the part of a high-end clothing company (even if its clothes betray itself). This is a two-pronged strategy, one that relies on strong imagery and even stronger talent.
In March alone, not even a month after the surprise Bad Bunny cosign, Zara announced a two-year creative partnership with design legend John Galliano and a collaboration with Willy Chavarria, adding the two generational talents to an already stacked series of partnerships partners as disparate as Studio Nicholson, and wander, Stefano Pilati, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Steven Meisel, and even Pantone — yes, even the color swatch company that consistently rage baits with the Color of the Year has done a Zara collection.
Last year’s 50th-anniversary blowout feels like the point when Zara began positioning itself to look less like other fast-fashion retailers and more like the luxury industry that it’s long swiped from, embodied by a 50-piece capsule that featured reissued designs from the likes of Narciso Rodriguez and Anna Sui, plus a photoshoot that managed to pack just about every major model of the last 50 years in one room.
Even Zara’s retail experience has become elevated through some very intentional cribbing. As our Editor-in-Chief, Noah Johnson, astutely noted last February, an interior shot on Zara’s website looked almost identical to the shop of San Francisco menswear label Evan Kinori — and, frankly, the curated calm of a Lemaire store.
Fast fashion is built on duping more expensive, higher-quality clothing, but attempting to ape the atmosphere of a brand’s physical store is a clear reaction to demand for an all-encompassing aspirational experience. As more people have swapped online shopping carts for IRL retail therapy, stores have reacted by adding everything from a pottery studio and sushi restaurant to a wellness studio for “meditation, movement, and learning.”
Like all things that filter down in fashion, it’s only natural that Zara would quite literally read the room and rethink its entire presentation. The difference here is that no amount of zen and warm wood can mask the quality of the clothes. Still, the déjà vu of hitting Zara's website or stores and feeling like you’ve seen this look before extends to the talent behind the scenes of its exceptional promotional imagery.
The Bad Bunny shoot is excellent thanks in no small part to the talent that worked on it but so are even the ordinary styling photos that populate Zara's web store.
One of Zara’s most striking recent campaigns, December 2024’s Red for Spring, was styled by Charlotte Collet and photographed by Victor Brun, whose collective output includes work with the likes of AURALEE, Jil Sander, CELINE, and Wales Bonner — all brands built on good taste and great clothing, which Zara certainly admires.
It’s a smart business move to tap the same talent who make these labels’ campaigns sing, and you’d be forgiven for seeing something like April’s ZW Collection — shot by award-winning fashion photographer Craig McDean and styled by Marie-Amélie Sauvé, former fashion director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine — and not immediately clock that it’s Zara.
Scrolling through the “Benito Antonio” collection’s lookbook, even I was temporarily taken in by the tide of Bad Bunny’s vibe. I wondered what it would be like to clamber up on some rocks with Bunny, the ocean at my Zara-clad back.
But reality beckons, and as nice as the clothes might look through a screen, I’ve been burned one too many times by trips into their stores, buoyed by a hope that the quality I see online will match what I feel between my fingers (it never does).
The fact of the matter is that Zara is still Zara. It might be a source for a decent pair of pants or a leather loafer for cheap every so often, but there’s no uncoupling the product from the polluting, problematic machine of fast-fashion — no matter how much star power it uses to blind us to that fact.
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