Vivienne Westwood Casts Cicciolina, 74, in Its New Autumn Campaign
The former adult-film performer and Italian parliamentarian fronts Juergen Teller’s latest campaign for a fashion house whose visual language has long joined historical dress with sexual provocation.
Vivienne Westwood has placed Ilona Staller, the Hungarian-born Italian performer and former politician better known as Cicciolina, at the center of its Autumn-Winter 2026-27 campaign.
At 74, she appears not as a discreet reference to the past but as one of the unmistakable personalities anchoring a deliberately eclectic cast.
Photographed by Juergen Teller, a longtime collaborator of the British fashion house, the campaign was made inside the Belloni showroom in Barlassina, between Milan and Como.
The family-owned Italian furniture company has produced cabinetry and ornate interiors for more than 150 years.
Teller’s pictures set Westwood’s corseted knitwear, long dresses and tailored pieces against Rococo Revival giltwood furniture, Art Deco-influenced cabinets and richly upholstered rooms.
Staller is photographed in black lace gloves, plunging knit dresses and the floral headpieces associated with her public persona.
The setting supplies grandeur without disguising the campaign’s central contrast: an establishment interior occupied by clothes and characters chosen for their theatricality, irregularity and resistance to conventional ideas of refinement.
Creative director Andreas Kronthaler selected Belloni after visiting the company and has connected the Italian location to his life in Milan.
The campaign was completed in temperatures reaching 41 degrees Celsius by Teller and his creative partner, Dovile Drizyte.
Kronthaler said the finished photographs gave little indication of the oppressive heat.
He described meeting Staller for the first time on set and called her a remarkable woman and an icon capable of bringing people together.
Kronthaler was Vivienne Westwood’s husband and creative partner until her death in 2022. He now directs the house that bears her name, continuing its characteristic collision of historic European dress, punk irreverence, exaggerated sexuality and political dissent.
Casting Staller fits that vocabulary, but it also gives the campaign a specifically Italian cultural reference whose significance extends beyond adult entertainment.
Born in Budapest in 1951, Staller established herself in Italy during the 1970s, initially through radio and erotic entertainment.
She later became internationally known as an adult-film performer, cultivating the Cicciolina persona through blonde wigs, corsets, lace, feathers, flowers and consciously excessive displays of femininity.
Her celebrity crossed into formal politics in 1987, when she was elected to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies on the Radical Party ticket.
She served until 1992, making her one of the rare adult performers to hold national elected office.
The result turned a figure often treated as spectacle into a legislator and intensified arguments in Italy about censorship, sexuality, celebrity and political representation.
Staller also became entangled with the contemporary art market through her relationship with Jeff Koons.
Their sexually explicit collaboration, presented as the Made in Heaven series, blurred performance, pornography, autobiography and commercial art.
They married in 1991, had a son, Ludwig, and separated before their marriage ended in 1994. The work remains among the most debated episodes in both careers.
The Westwood casting is not an isolated encounter between luxury fashion and the adult industry.
Adult performer Colby Keller appeared in the house’s Spring-Summer 2016 Mirror the World campaign, also photographed by Teller, which used Venice and its environmental vulnerability as its setting.
Rocco Siffredi later walked in the Dsquared2 Spring-Summer 2024 presentation, while Mia Khalifa appeared in Trashy Clothing’s first physical Paris runway show in March 2026.
Those examples do not amount to a single political movement.
They do, however, show how fashion repeatedly recruits personalities whose existing notoriety can challenge distinctions between respectability and transgression.
In Staller’s case, the strategy depends on an identity assembled over five decades across radio, cinema, electoral politics, contemporary art and celebrity culture.
The new campaign brings that history into the present while giving a 74-year-old woman conspicuous visibility in an industry still organized largely around youth.
At 74, she appears not as a discreet reference to the past but as one of the unmistakable personalities anchoring a deliberately eclectic cast.
Photographed by Juergen Teller, a longtime collaborator of the British fashion house, the campaign was made inside the Belloni showroom in Barlassina, between Milan and Como.
The family-owned Italian furniture company has produced cabinetry and ornate interiors for more than 150 years.
Teller’s pictures set Westwood’s corseted knitwear, long dresses and tailored pieces against Rococo Revival giltwood furniture, Art Deco-influenced cabinets and richly upholstered rooms.
Staller is photographed in black lace gloves, plunging knit dresses and the floral headpieces associated with her public persona.
The setting supplies grandeur without disguising the campaign’s central contrast: an establishment interior occupied by clothes and characters chosen for their theatricality, irregularity and resistance to conventional ideas of refinement.
Creative director Andreas Kronthaler selected Belloni after visiting the company and has connected the Italian location to his life in Milan.
The campaign was completed in temperatures reaching 41 degrees Celsius by Teller and his creative partner, Dovile Drizyte.
Kronthaler said the finished photographs gave little indication of the oppressive heat.
He described meeting Staller for the first time on set and called her a remarkable woman and an icon capable of bringing people together.
Kronthaler was Vivienne Westwood’s husband and creative partner until her death in 2022. He now directs the house that bears her name, continuing its characteristic collision of historic European dress, punk irreverence, exaggerated sexuality and political dissent.
Casting Staller fits that vocabulary, but it also gives the campaign a specifically Italian cultural reference whose significance extends beyond adult entertainment.
Born in Budapest in 1951, Staller established herself in Italy during the 1970s, initially through radio and erotic entertainment.
She later became internationally known as an adult-film performer, cultivating the Cicciolina persona through blonde wigs, corsets, lace, feathers, flowers and consciously excessive displays of femininity.
Her celebrity crossed into formal politics in 1987, when she was elected to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies on the Radical Party ticket.
She served until 1992, making her one of the rare adult performers to hold national elected office.
The result turned a figure often treated as spectacle into a legislator and intensified arguments in Italy about censorship, sexuality, celebrity and political representation.
Staller also became entangled with the contemporary art market through her relationship with Jeff Koons.
Their sexually explicit collaboration, presented as the Made in Heaven series, blurred performance, pornography, autobiography and commercial art.
They married in 1991, had a son, Ludwig, and separated before their marriage ended in 1994. The work remains among the most debated episodes in both careers.
The Westwood casting is not an isolated encounter between luxury fashion and the adult industry.
Adult performer Colby Keller appeared in the house’s Spring-Summer 2016 Mirror the World campaign, also photographed by Teller, which used Venice and its environmental vulnerability as its setting.
Rocco Siffredi later walked in the Dsquared2 Spring-Summer 2024 presentation, while Mia Khalifa appeared in Trashy Clothing’s first physical Paris runway show in March 2026.
Those examples do not amount to a single political movement.
They do, however, show how fashion repeatedly recruits personalities whose existing notoriety can challenge distinctions between respectability and transgression.
In Staller’s case, the strategy depends on an identity assembled over five decades across radio, cinema, electoral politics, contemporary art and celebrity culture.
The new campaign brings that history into the present while giving a 74-year-old woman conspicuous visibility in an industry still organized largely around youth.
