The Desert Is the Best Backdrop Money Can Buy

Coachella has a specific gravitational pull on a certain kind of person—the kind who wants to be photographed as much as they want to hear music, which is to say, most of the attendees. The lineup matters less than the light at that hour, less than who’s standing next to you, less than whether the outfit reads correctly from twenty feet away when someone points a lens at it. In a fairly short span of time it became the most expensive and logistically complex backdrop in fashion’s annual calendar.

Alexander Wang understood this before most, which is why his adidas Originals campaign skipped the festival floor entirely and drove out into the Colorado Desert on the way there. He took Lexi Boling, Binx Walton, Cat McNeil, Issa Lish, and Hanne Gaby Odiele—a group of models with enough collective presence to make a parking lot look like somewhere worth being—and let the landscape do what studio lighting never quite manages: make the clothes feel like they’ve already lived a life.

There’s something honest about shooting sportswear against cracked earth and bleached rock. Wang’s aesthetic has always been about controlled tension—clean versus raw, expensive versus street—and the desert supplies that friction for free. You don’t have to construct the grit when the location is genuinely indifferent to how good you look in it. As someone who thinks a lot about how backgrounds talk back to the things placed in front of them, I find that logic hard to argue with. The images feel less like a lookbook and more like evidence that these people actually went somewhere, even if the whole trip was very carefully organized.