From Edinburgh to the Eiffel Tower’s Shadow
Ella Hunt arrived in Paris for her first fashion campaign carrying two identities at once – actress and musician – and a schedule that left little room for jet lag. The campaign is for Banana Republic’s holiday season, and the shoot placed her squarely in the kind of setting that makes fashion work feel momentarily surreal: Paris, a camera crew, and clothing chosen to carry a brand through its most commercially loaded quarter of the year.
She leaned into the silliness of it.
That phrase – her own – cuts through the usual campaign-speak about inspiration and vision. Hunt, who has built a following through her acting work and a parallel music career, spoke to Harper’s Bazaar on set, offering a picture of someone who finds the absurdity of a fashion shoot more energizing than intimidating. The result is a campaign that feels less stiff than most holiday retail pushes, and an interview that reveals a performer comfortable sitting with contradiction: serious about craft, unbothered by pomp.
What the Banana Republic Campaign Actually Looks Like
Banana Republic’s holiday campaigns have historically reached for a particular register – aspirational but accessible, polished without being cold. Signing Hunt fits that logic. She carries enough cultural recognition to register with a younger audience without the kind of overexposure that makes celebrity partnerships feel cynical. The Paris location sharpens the premium positioning the brand has been working toward, and shooting there rather than in a studio gives the images a texture that catalogue work rarely achieves.
Hunt arrived on set with her characteristic mix of self-awareness and playfulness. On a fashion shoot, both qualities matter more than they might seem. Self-awareness keeps an actress from overcooking expressions designed for a screen rather than a still frame. Playfulness keeps the clothes from wearing the person – a risk especially real in holiday campaigns, where the garments often arrive heavily styled and the talent is expected to animate them under time pressure.
She described the small things currently bringing her joy, a theme that ran through her Harper’s Bazaar conversation and gave the shoot a frame: not grand gestures or milestone moments, but the accumulated texture of ordinary pleasure. It is a mood that maps well onto what Banana Republic is selling – clothing for occasions that are festive but not theatrical, dressy but not exhausting.
The Music, the Acting, and the Space Between
Hunt has always operated in two registers simultaneously. Her acting credits pulled her into public view, but she has pushed her music career forward in parallel rather than treating it as a side project or a personal hobby kept separate from professional life. The two pursuits feed different things. Acting requires disappearing into someone else’s structure; music demands building your own from scratch. Managing both without flattening either takes a particular kind of discipline, and it tends to produce performers who are unusually precise about what they want from any given project.
That precision shows up in how she talks about joy – not as a broad aspiration but as something she actively tracks in the specific and the small. The little things, she said. Not a philosophy, just a practice.
For someone splitting attention between a music career and an acting career, the Banana Republic campaign represents a third lane: fashion, which operates on its own timeline, speaks its own visual language, and rewards a different kind of presence than either a recording session or a film set. First campaigns tend to be careful affairs. They establish a relationship between brand and talent without overcommitting either party. This one, set in Paris for the holiday season, is a particular kind of debut – high stakes by retail standards, but designed to look effortless.
Joy as a Working Method
There is something quietly countercultural about a performer who names silliness as a strategy and means it. The entertainment industry’s dominant mode is earnest intensity – the long interview about craft, the detailed account of preparation, the seriousness that signals seriousness. Hunt sidesteps that without dismissing it. She is not performing casualness over a foundation of anxiety. She appears to actually find the whole thing – the Paris set, the holiday campaign, the Harper’s Bazaar microphone – more funny than fraught.
Banana Republic gets an actress and musician who brings lightness to a shoot that could easily tip into stiffness. Hunt gets a campaign set in Paris and a conversation that lets her frame her own working philosophy on her own terms. The small joys she catalogued on set – unnamed in specifics but present in tone – are the same quality the campaign is trying to bottle: the sense that a piece of clothing can make an ordinary December moment feel worth dressing for.
She shot the campaign. She talked to Harper’s Bazaar. She leaned into the silliness. What Banana Republic does with that energy between now and December 25 is the actual test – because holiday campaigns live or die not in Paris photo studios but on the phones of people deciding, at the last minute, whether any of this makes them want to buy something.
