Colour
theory

In 1991, New York designer Tibor Kalman and fashion photographer Oliviero Toscani founded COLORS, a magazine funded by Benetton. As our very own Tom Ridgway – who worked for Colors in 1996 – described it, “Each issue would investigate a theme employing a global network of correspondents and often using objects to tease out wider symbolic and cultural meaning … [in] a sort of Barthesian anthropology of the quotidian.”

Toscani was responsible for a series of ad campaigns that have retained, some 45 years later, practically all of their scandalous effect. From a portrait of the young man David Kirby dying of AIDS, to a shot of a Hasidic Jew and a Palestinian with their arms round each other, the shock factor remains very much alive.

Although in 2025 the capacity of any media to provoke shock feels severely diminished, like Toscani certain online provocateurs reserve the power to make us pause mid-scroll. One of those is artist and irreverent Instagram persona, Rick Dick, who leads Benetton’s new FW25 campaign. In his style, it is composed entirely of AI images.

Whilst Toscani saw his job as presenting audiences with unvarnished reality, Rick Dick trades in hyperreality. The Italian artist’s irony-laced, multilayered pop cultural references are modelled in the glassy uncanniness of the AI image, and often deliver an explicitly anti-fashion critique of celebrity and spectacle. His Instagram feed features Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons as the two executives caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert, Skims models that morph into Labubus, and Cardi B transforming into a bird.

In Benetton’s new campaign, Rick Dick uses AI not to imagine the fantastical, but to reanimate and amplify the brand’s existing aesthetic codes. Posting to his Instagram followers, Rick Dick writes that, ‘Benetton colors speak. I just up the volume’. At the forefront of Benetton’s FW25 collection is its signature knitwear, delivered, as always, in bold colour. Across photo and video, Rick Dick manipulates shape and texture to depict beaming AI models bundled up in downy knits.

The campaign will surely raise questions about the purpose of advertising and fashion photography, questions which Benetton has been fielding for decades. Much like the campaigns from the 90s, this campaign doesn’t depict any material products. But fashion imagery has always been about more than just selling a product. By handing over control to an Instagram famous AI-auteur, Benetton reinvents itself as a brand trying to tread the cutting edge of culture and technology. In 2018, Oliviero Toscani told Vogue: ‘Why would you want to see clothes in an advert? If you want to see the clothes you can see them in our shops. On a billboard, I can show you how the company thinks, what it believes, what it represents.’ Benetton’s tradition of provocation lives on in this campaign, if not in content, then in form.