The brief was unusual enough that we read it twice. A menswear brand — heritage Italian, mid-century aesthetic, Florence-based — was building a co-ed campaign for their SS26 collection and wanted a women's model whose presence would not domesticate the visual. They did not want softness. They did not want the conventional function of the woman-in-a-menswear-campaign, which historically has been to provide approachable contrast to the clothing's austerity.
They wanted, in their own words, "parity of authority."
We sent Ines Marchetti.
Why the casting was correct
Ines has a quality that is unusual in women's fashion modeling and particularly useful in mixed-gender or menswear-adjacent campaigns: her authority reads as unconditional. It does not depend on the frame around her. She is not authoritative because she is performing alongside soft contrast — she is authoritative on her own terms, which means she holds visual parity with male talent naturally rather than through art direction.
Her Italian formation is also relevant here. She understands the aesthetic language of Italian men's tailoring — not in a studied, external way, but because she grew up adjacent to it. She moves in the clothing with familiarity rather than translation.
What the images produced
The campaign, shot by a Florentine photographer whose work Laurent has long admired for its restraint, produced images that did exactly what the brief asked for: a visual conversation between equals rather than a conventional gendered hierarchy.
Ines held the frame in a manner that required no editorial assistance. The clothing read. The authority read. The brief was satisfied.
The larger point
Casting a women's model in a menswear-adjacent context is not, in itself, progressive. It can be — and frequently is — merely decorative, which is worse than conventional because it disguises decoration as statement.
What makes a casting like this work is selecting talent whose presence is genuinely unconditional — who would hold the frame in any context because their authority is internal, not constructed by contrast with their surroundings.
Laurent's roster is built around that quality. The Pitti campaign is a demonstration of why.
