Gentle Monster and Aldi create two very different genre-defying campaigns

Two campaigns this week make odd bedfellows, but both work to subvert our expectations of genre tropes.

A campaign from avant-garde eyewear brand Gentle Monster and another from supermarket giant Aldi might live in different worlds, yet both demonstrate how brands are increasingly subverting category conventions from within.

Unexpected eyewear effort

First up, we were big fans of Gentle Monster’s surreal, universe-making eyewear campaign.

The brand’s 2026 Veggie Collection campaigns are simultaneously sensual and clinical in their execution, employing a cinematic style that makes for an oddly satisfying watch.

The ads reinterpret botanical shapes into foldable eyewear designs, extending the brand’s long-standing interest in blurring fashion, art, and environment.

Perfume genius

Aldi, meanwhile, is clearly having fun with a bit of perfume parody in a supermarket aisle.

Its Lacura fragrance campaign mirrors the structure of luxury perfume advertising with dramatic close-ups, sweeping music, a mysterious protagonist… before puncturing it with an absurd twist.

The reveal here is that a mock-brooding leading man called ‘Dave’, an Aldi employee, is in fact lounging in a trolley in a stockroom.

Vibe shift

Sure, these two ads might be very different in tone, but we thought they had an odd bit of synergy.

Rather than reject fashion advertising tropes, Gentle Monster intensifies them to an extreme, which feels both uncanny and self-aware.

In that sense, like Aldi, both ads ultimately play for laughs. Aldi’s humour is just a little more overt.