Olga Basha’s absurd jeans campaign breaks all the luxury fashion rules /

A fresh take / Olga Basha, founded by designer Celine Eriksen, creates jeans in two distinct styles: a low/mid and mid/high unisex fit. Each season, the style is refined and produced in limited batches using carefully sourced denim from small-scale mills and curated dead stock fabrics.

With such a unique approach to garment production, the brand needs an equally unique approach to its communication. This ad feels like a breath of fresh air in the ultra-curated, glossy world of luxury fashion, a category that's notorious for taking itself rather seriously.

The campaign echoes a similar approach to Loewe's Decades of Confusion campaign, where the Spanish luxury fashion house recruited actors Daniel Levy and Aubrey Plaza to create a humorous ad poking fun at the confusion surrounding the pronunciation of its brand name. Both campaigns demonstrate how having a bit of fun can help brands stand out in a sea of sameness.

These refreshing, funny scripts catch viewers off guard in what they expect to be serious, prestigious luxury fashion advertising. The humour works because it subverts category expectations: luxury fashion ads typically rely on aspiration, exclusivity and polished perfection. By embracing absurdity and playfulness instead, both brands create memorable moments that feel authentic rather than manufactured.

Both campaigns also cleverly draw focus to their brand names through the narrative itself. In Olga Basha’s case, the entire punchline revolves around the text exchange revealing the brand name, while Loewe’s campaign addresses its brand name confusion head-on. This helps the brands stay memorable and top of mind in an unexpectedly entertaining way.

For smaller brands like Olga Basha, this approach is particularly smart. Rather than trying to compete with established luxury houses on production values or celebrity endorsements, it’s competing on creativity and personality, areas where nimble, independent brands can often outmanoeuvre their larger, more risk-averse competitors.

Look away / Olga Basha nailed the gross-out factor to get people talking. This calculated repulsion makes the ad super PRable, backing up the idea that emotion drives effectiveness.

Research consistently shows that emotion-driven campaigns perform better. Les Binet and Peter Field's landmark 2013 study, The Long and the Short of It, found that rational campaigns generate an average of 1.0 brand effects, while emotional campaigns produce 1.7 such effects. This emotional advantage extends to absurdity and disgust too. Media strategy expert Karen Nelson-Field’s research revealed that ads that generate strong reactions, whether positive or negative, capture 16% more attention than those with weak responses.

Here, Olga Basha grabs attention by doing something rare for the category: leaning into disgust and absurdity. As explored in our Creative Tactic, Create Disgust, leveraging a negative visceral response has the potential to get a brand into cultural conversation in a way very few ads do.

What’s striking is how Olga Basha toys with disgust. The work oozes craft and confidence, moves at its own pace, and hooks you straight away. The humour is dry, precise and genuinely funny. The films look suitably gorgeous, with a grainy film texture that makes them feel alive, distinct and premium. But while the form is luxury, the content is not – and that tension is what makes them sing.

By choosing calculated repulsion over safe, forgettable messaging, Olga Basha creates the kind of organic buzz that traditional advertising struggles to achieve.