The first light hits Copacabana like a slow exhale, and suddenly the city stirs. Dsquared2’s SS26 Brazil campaign captures that exact instant—the moment when morning softness gives way to the magnetic pull of night. Shot entirely on home soil by Rio-born photographer Rafael Moura, the campaign transforms the Italian house’s signature edge into something sun-warmed, instinctive, and unmistakably Brazilian. It is not borrowed glamour. It is lived rhythm, rendered in printed swimwear, dark-wash denim, and beads that catch the light like salt on skin.
Rafael Moura grew up a self-described “Rio kid,” camera in hand long before the fashion world noticed. The beaches, the hills, the restless energy of a city that never quite sleeps—these were his first subjects. Early on, his lens wandered beyond the city limits. By 2016 he was already known for images that framed environmental harmony across remote landscapes, a quiet testament to a photographer who understood beauty as something both fragile and fierce. Yet Rio remained his anchor. Even as commissions took him around the globe, he returned, drawn by the same infectious cadence that now defines his most high-profile work to date.
The breakthrough arrived when luxury brands began seeking voices that could speak with unfiltered authority. Moura’s ability to translate local energy into universal desire made him the natural choice for Dsquared2’s Spring/Summer 2026 campaign. Dean and Dan Caten, the Canadian twin designers who built their house on provocative glamour and rock-and-roll attitude, handed the creative reins to a Brazilian team for the first time. The result feels less like a campaign and more like a dispatch from the inside.
Moura’s photographs do what few international fashion productions manage: they refuse to exoticize. Instead, they immerse. Models Mauria Caetano, Jonas Barros, Marlon Teixeira, Felipe Bertuol, and Matheus Batista move through Rio’s natural light with the ease of people who belong there. The styling, by Haley Wollens, layers the collection’s relaxed volumes—D2 Jetski blazers, Wild2 tank tops, Dancing Flowers pants, and beaded lace-up boots—against the city’s own textures: salt air, tiled sidewalks, the low hum of traffic. Utility handbags swing like afterthoughts; printed bucket hats tilt with casual confidence. Heeled sandals kick up sand. Nothing is static. Everything follows the rhythm.
The campaign’s cultural weight is immediate. In an industry long criticized for parachuting in foreign creatives to “interpret” Brazil, Dsquared2 chose an all-Brazilian cast and crew—photographer, models, production team. The decision feels both timely and overdue. Moura’s images do not perform Brazilianness for a European gaze; they let it simply exist, confident and charged. The accompanying film, directed by Gabriel Novis and Famke Vanhagen under MAWE Productions, extends the same principle: movement is instinctive, bodies draw closer, silhouettes obey the shifting light. From the stillness of early morning to the intensity of night, the collection reveals itself in real time.
COME Dsquared2 SS26 Brazil campaign lands in April 2026, its relevance sharpens. Consumers increasingly demand provenance; they want to know who stood behind the lens and why the place matters. Rafael Moura answers both questions without a single explanatory caption. His photographs sell the clothes by first selling the feeling—the heat on skin, the salt in the air, the pulse that makes Rio impossible to replicate. In doing so, they quietly recalibrate expectations for what a lusso campaign can be when the storyteller is also a native.
Rafael Moura has never left Rio behind, even when the world pulled him elsewhere. With this campaign, he brings the city forward, unapologetic and alive, proving that the most powerful moda stories are the ones told from within. The SS26 collection will travel far beyond Brazil’s shores, but its heartbeat will always belong to the photographer who first heard it on Copacabana at dawn.
Images Courtesy of Dsquared2
In altre notizie sulla campagna del marchio, Zara Spring 2026 Swimwear: Sun-Faded Nostalgia & Mediterranean Style
