The collaboration between ZARA and Samuel Ross is less a collection than an attempt to redefine the relationship between clothing, protection, and distance. While fashion usually seduces, Ross withdraws – into materials, layers, and surfaces that turn restraint itself into form.
The Designer as Constructor
Samuel Ross, founder of A-Cold-Wall, has long shed the image of a streetwear innovator. His thinking is architectural; his fashion a reaction to industrial processes. In collaboration with ZARA, he translates this approach into a controlled language of accessibility. The pieces resemble prototypes from an anonymous workshop: functional, reduced, without pathos. Ross is less interested in the individual garment than in the idea of repetition. Everything is serial, nothing individual. The designer stages depersonalization as an aesthetic virtue.
The Forgotten Form
The fabrics are familiar — wool, denim, cotton — yet they offer no comfort. Their surfaces are matte, muted, and absorbent. Ross refuses shine and motion. The textures seem to seal the skin rather than reveal it. Within this material politics lies a quiet resistance to the overproduction of visual stimuli. These clothes are not made to be seen but to endure. Even the accessories — hats, bags, and shoes — appear as tools, not ornaments. Ross’s material aesthetics become a discipline of self-limitation.
Silhouette and Protection
The silhouettes appear dense and heavy, almost immobile. They emphasize not the body but its concealment. The wearer becomes a carrier, not an image. It recalls uniforms and workwear, though without heroic gesture. The protection these forms provide is physical rather than symbolic. It is clothing for duration, not for display. In a fashion world exhausted by imagery, Ross withdraws from pose – and formulates a counter-concept to visibility.
Staging and Gaze
The campaign shows models who do not perform but stand. No gaze seeks contact, no face demands attention. The bodies are vessels, not characters — they carry without narrating. Their presence is functional, not psychological; they embody structure rather than emotion. The light remains neutral, the spaces anonymous. In this photographic coolness arises a form of truth that frees fashion imagery from desire. The staging becomes a mirror of construction: precise, emotionless, incorruptible.
The Team of Reduction
Photographed by Willy Vanderperre and directed by Gorka Sorozabal, the campaign follows a documentary principle: distance over emotion, observation over seduction. Models Julez Smith, Long Li, Timo Pan, and Chandler Frye represent a new generation of international faces who convince less through individuality than through presence. Their calmness gives the garments proportion — no expression, no pose, only composure. Together with hairstylist Anthony Turner and makeup artist Lynsey Alexander, they create a visual language that does not elevate the body but neutralizes it — a language of precision.
Color as Withdrawal
The color palette moves between earthy, functional, and toneless shades of brown, grey, khaki, and black. There are no accents, no compositions. Color here is not expression but concentration. The renunciation of visual tension becomes a principle. Ross opts for emotional neutrality — a silence rare in fashion. Even light fabrics lose their luminosity. The collection speaks in undertones — a language without volume.
The Gesture of Distance
Ross’s designs refuse the desire that drives the fashion business. The models appear anonymous, their poses incidental. The focus is not individuality but system. The garments become a code of attitude: discipline, control, self-restraint. Within this severity lies a paradoxical humanism — a reminder that reduction can also be care. Fashion loses its voice to protect the body. Yet that body remains undefined, almost absent.
The Silent Translation
In the second season of their collaboration, ZARA and Samuel Ross demonstrate how a mass label can absorb the language of an avant-gardist without distorting it. ZARA × Samuel Ross is not a rupture but an attempt to transfer industrial thinking into a mass format. The result is cool, precise, and remarkably restrained. Ross uses ZARA’s reach to extend the notion of functionality to the edge of depersonalization. Fashion here ceases to be ornament and becomes a commentary on an overstimulated present.