Fashion’s Surrealist Response to a World in Chaos

A Deep Dive into How to Take the Surrealist Fashion and Satire Narratives of 2025 Campaigns

There’s been a surge in escapist fashion campaigns in 2025 - ones designed to confuse, delight, and parody reality. These surreal, playful visuals offer more than aesthetics. They reflect how fashion, and society, react when the world is falling apart.

Let’s face it: global economic instability is deepening, fascist and misogynistic ideologies have gained traction, AI is raising new ethical and existential dilemmas, and climate change is worsening with minimal action. In short, everything feels broken.

So, why not stage a shoot with bananas in a golf cart or earrings in marmalade? That’s exactly what fashion is doing - leaning into weirdness, subversion, and satire.

Saint Laurent - An Ordinary Day

Jacquemus: Bananas for Jon

Jon Gries (AKA sketchy Greg from The White Lotus) is lounging in banana-yellow convertibles, golfing with bananas, and petting llamas in Jacquemus' brilliantly absurd GOING BANANAS FOR JON campaign.

It’s ridiculous - and that’s the point. Bananas are the ultimate nihilistic fruit. The campaign reflects a kind of joyful absurdity: poking fun at elite retirement culture while riding the White Lotus wave and parodying the very demographic it represents. Is this satire of privilege, a jab at the audience who resents it*, or just artful trolling? Probably all three.

*It's giving TikTok’s ‘imagine hating me’ trend.

Images: Jacquemus

Saint Laurent: An Ordinary Day

Keywords: Saint Laurent 2025, Martin Parr fashion campaign, fashion surrealism

In collaboration with British photographer Martin Parr, Saint Laurent transforms the mundane — tea time, groceries, sunbathing — into absurdist elegance. Think: sunglasses on dogs, earrings in jam, and haute couture on patio chairs.

The aesthetic gives Schitt’s Creek meets editorial opulence: out-of-place glamour finding its footing in suburban banality. Is this a subtle take on finding grace amid economic insecurity? Or just a reminder that luxury can be ridiculous and sublime at once?

Source: Saint Laurent

Self-Portrait: Dreams of Past Lives

Shot in Seoul and rendered with dreamy AI visuals, Self-Portrait’s Pre-Fall 2025 campaign places Blackpink’s Jisoo in uncanny, 1960s-inspired digital environments. It’s nostalgic, dreamy - and deeply fake. But you can’t tell straight away, and that’s why it feels like an AI commentary, despite commissioning Drew Vickers to produce it.

"Even with everything she’s achieved, there’s still a sense of mystery about her,” says Creative Director Han Chong. That blend of mystique and simulation is the point. In a time where identity, memory, and reality are being digitally redefined, Self-Portrait uses AI in fashion to explore how we reconstruct beauty, history, and even ourselves.

Source: Self Portrait

Morphe: Garden of Eden Reimagined

Working with Design Army, Morphe blurs the line between AI-generated visuals and real-world texture in a dazzling, surreal beauty campaign. The concept? Beauty as temptation — a lush, luminous Eden brimming with forbidden fruits and punchy palettes.

Pum Lefebure, CCO of Design Army, explains: “We imagined a quasi-futuristic, paradisiacal world — believable, yet surreal.” It’s a bold departure from the long-reigning clean girl aesthetic. For a Gen Z audience, it reintroduces maximalism, drama, and indulgence into beauty. It’s theatrical rebellion, and it works.

Source: Morphe

Diesel: Your Life in D

Diesel tells a lifetime story — literally. In Your Life in D, we see a baby born in denim, teens partying in 1DR bags, adults aging in Diesel fits, and finally, heaven: complete with denim angels. It’s clever, cinematic, and unhinged in the best way.

But here’s where things get murky: for a brand that talks about sustainability (For Responsible Living), this linear "cradle-to-grave" narrative misses an opportunity to showcase circular fashion. There’s no product-driven connection to Diesel’s sustainable offerings. It’s a missed moment - because with this level of storytelling, the campaign could’ve challenged what sustainable fashion looks like, too.

Source: Diesel

Balenciaga: High Summer 2025

Balenciaga’s resort campaign is peak parody. CGI beaches, over-saturated sunsets, and retro hotel taglines like “Make Yourself at Home.” The models sway in artificial breezes,  styled only in the impractical and impossible.

It’s a satirical take on luxury aspiration, mocking influencer culture and the performative nature of “vacation content.” In a world where we don’t unplug, we just post. Balenciaga doesn’t sell escape, it sells the simulation of escape.

Source: Balenciaga

What’s the Moral Cost of Making a Point?

Here’s the tension: Is it okay for luxury brands to be ironic, playful, even nihilistic — when so much of the world is in crisis? Especially when their campaigns cost more than what many people spend on groceries in a year.

When Jacquemus sets up a surrealist banana universe or Saint Laurent pairs jam with jewelry, it’s artful escapism — but it also risks disconnect. Many of these campaigns are speaking from a place of safety, far from the instability faced by much of their potential audience.

The satire is smart. The visuals are stunning. But the privilege is real.

Morphe, on the other hand, speaks to a different kind of consumer. Their Garden of Eden campaign doesn’t cost six figures to shoot, nor does it market thousand-dollar products. Instead, it offers its Gen Z customers a surrealist beauty alternative to the minimalist norms that are starting to feel a little off - an inclusive, playful, maximalist vision that still feels accessible.

Surrealist fashion is not just a luxury of production, but a luxury of thought. This balance between escapism and empathy may be the real differentiator in 2025.

Escapism as Expression, Escapism as Resistance

Escapist campaigns are more than just viral content. They act as funhouse mirrors — the ones that distorting reality to reflect truth in exaggerated, playful ways.

In a world heavy with fear and fatigue, these campaigns offer buoyancy. Not as distraction, but as expression.

In collapse, there’s absurdity. In absurdity, there’s creativity. And in creativity, there’s resistance.

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