Ezra Petronio doesn’t need to shout to make his presence known. As co-founder and creative director of Self Service magazine, and the quietly influential force behind some of fashion’s most defining campaigns, his signature is restraint with intention. Alongside Lana Petrusevych—his creative partner and co-director at Petronio Associates—he has helped rewire the way fashion communicates: with clarity, purpose, and a calibrated understanding of culture in motion.
Petronio came up through the image-making tradition before branding became a buzzword. Born in New York, raised in Paris, he grew up with a tap dancer mother and an art director father—a house where ideas moved visually. In 1993, he founded Petronio Associates, a Paris-based creative studio that would soon become the go-to for brands like Prada, Miu Miu, Chanel, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton. The next year, he launched Self Service, a biannual fashion journal that rejected magazine gloss for something rawer, more honest. It was never a vanity project—it was a record of the people who shaped the industry, including Petronio himself.
“A Shared Journey”
From the start, Petronio’s work has been collaborative. One of his earliest commercial projects was designing packaging for Comme des Garçons under Rei Kawakubo. Soon after, he began a decade-long run working with Miuccia Prada, contributing to both Prada and Miu Miu’s visual language—including fragrance design. These weren’t just campaigns; they were entire identities built with discipline and instinct.
Fast forward to 2015, when Lana Petrusevych joined Petronio Associates. By 2016, they had launched Content Matters, a sister agency focused on digital-first storytelling—social media, motion content, multi-platform campaigns. Where Petronio refined print’s visual codes, Petrusevych brought fluency in new formats. Their chemistry shows. The duo’s creative process is dialogic—fast, flexible, sometimes sparring, always in sync.
“Why would we do what we do halfway?”
— Petronio & Petrusevych, as quoted in Self Service No. 53
Visual Intelligence, Not Flash
Their hallmark is understatement. A Petronio-led campaign doesn’t pander to trends or rely on spectacle. Instead, it delivers an image that holds your attention without trying too hard. You see it in their work for Alaïa under Pieter Mulier: stark architectural compositions, minimal post-production, Daria Werbowy lit like a statue. You see it again in a recent Jimmy Choo campaign with Chloë Sevigny—channeling Y2K energy, but without the gimmick. It’s cultural memory recontextualized.
Their aesthetic feels modern without screaming “new.” Petronio has long insisted that the best visuals don’t age because they weren’t chasing the moment in the first place. Petrusevych ensures that principle translates to the screen—applying it to a five-second clip, a looping GIF, a full brand story. It’s this shared rigor that lets their campaigns breathe across platforms without losing edge or elegance.
The Art of the 360
The creative industry loves the phrase “360 branding,” but Petronio and Petrusevych actually deliver it. Their work for La Bouche Rouge—the clean luxury lipstick brand they helped co-found—spans product design, visual identity, packaging, storytelling, and social rollout. In an interview with The Business of Fashion, Petronio said, “We are brand creators, not just art directors,” adding that storytelling and strategy should never be separated from visuals.
“We are brand creators, not just art directors.”
— Ezra Petronio, The Business of Fashion, 2018
This integrated approach is how they’ve quietly defined the look of modern brands—whether it’s a cult-favorite niche house or a global luxury titan. From Hermès to Zara, their range is proof that a point of view can be fluid and still unmistakable.
Self Service as Time Capsule
Petronio’s Self Service remains one of the most respected fashion publications—not for clickability, but for its permanence. Every issue functions like a time capsule. Candid photo essays. Long-form interviews. The ever-growing archive of Polaroids Petronio shoots himself—over 4,000 and counting. They capture not just faces but moods: an insider’s chronicle of what it means to be part of fashion’s visual evolution.
When asked by i-D in 2022 about his motivation behind the magazine, Petronio replied, “I wanted to create a space where creatives could reflect—not just be consumed.” That editorial ethos bleeds into his commercial work. Reflection, not reaction.
A Duo Built for Now
Petrusevych’s presence brings a quiet radicality to the studio. As a woman in a field still dominated by male creative directors, her perspective sharpens the work in subtle but significant ways. She knows that images today live across fragmented attention spans. That virality isn’t strategy. That coherence—true visual authorship—is the more difficult and meaningful win.
They move fluidly between roles: editors, photographers, designers, strategists. But more than anything, they’re translators—of brand to audience, past to present, product to purpose. There’s no formula—only fluency.
That philosophy—intentional, process-driven, and deeply visual—comes into sharper focus in Ezra Petronio: Visual Thinking & Image Making (Phaidon, 2022), a 600-page monograph co-edited by Petronio and Petrusevych. It’s part archive, part inside look at the creative process, charting three decades of campaigns, Polaroids, interviews, and design. Less a retrospective and more a working document, the book offers a rare perspective on how lasting imagery is made—and why it matters.
What Remains
In an industry obsessed with what’s next, Petronio and Petrusevych’s work insists on what lasts. They don’t chase cool—they build foundations. Their visuals don’t perform for clicks—they create cultural equity.
As Petronio once put it: “The tools change, but the story always matters.”
And that story, in their hands, is always worth watching.
