Antonin Tron's first campaign for Balmain has arrived, and he calls it L'heure du loup. The name plays on the French saying entre chien et loup, the unsettled stretch of evening when daylight gives way to dusk, and the campaign puts his debut Fall-Winter 2026 collection, shown in Paris in March.
Suffo Moncloa, the Spanish photographer, shot the campaign inside a John Lautner house, one of the architect's sculptural mid-century builds, a choice that answers Pierre Balmain's own architectonic instincts, the same ones Tron worked through in the collection itself. The images arrive as a series of film stills, paused moments from a story that stays shadowy and charged, closer to the auteur cinema of America and Europe than to a typical advertisement.
Tron's characters wear the collection's leather aviator blazers, fil coupé dresses and draped blouses built over bold shoulders, caught mid-exchange in conversations the viewer never hears. Secrecy carries the mood, along with an eroticism the campaign makes no attempt to hide.
Tron's debut looked back to 1945 and the founding of Pierre Balmain's haute couture maison, and at the same time to the neo-noir heroines of the 1980s, women of grit and glamour both. The campaign adds another line to that lineage, honoring Monsieur Balmain's early championing of Hollywood's golden-era women.
For all the cinema, Tron's aim is plain: a Balmain stripped of flash and excess, its femininity brought back to full strength, built instead on a woman's uncompromising sexuality and self-possession.
Creative Direction: Antonin Tron
Art Direction: see see see studio
Photography: Suffo Moncloa
Still Life Photography: Justin Leveritt
Direction: Kerstijan Werdal
Styling: Agata Belcen
Set Design: Spencer Vrooman
Makeup: Karin Westerlund
Hair: Karim Belghiran
Models: Abuk Yor , Stephanie Cook, Mariane Godoy, Katherine Wilkey
Production: White Dot Productions
Casting Director: Julia Lange
