Somewhere between a sun-bleached desert and the late-night streets of Barcelona, Bad Gyal is doing what every early-2000s It girl learned to do: looking entirely unbothered while the flashbulbs pop. The Catalan reggaeton star fronts Dsquared2‘s new campaign for the Roxy Bag, the house’s latest statement accessory, photographed by Hugo Comte and released this September. It is a Western fantasy staged as a tabloid spread, and it lands at a moment when the label is working hard to make its next object the one everyone wants to be caught carrying.
The cast is small and knowing. Model Noah Brown shares the frame with Bad Gyal, while Dean and Dan Caten, the Canadian twins who founded the label in 1995, slip in for a cameo that reads less like vanity than a signature. Comte, who has a gift for making glamour look slightly dangerous, splits the story between dusty frontier landscapes and the city, borrowing the grammar of the paparazzi shot: the stride caught mid-motion, the half-turned glance, the bag held just so, as though a photographer had been waiting outside the hotel all night.
The Roxy itself is where the campaign earns its conviction. Its vocabulary comes straight from the tack room, with saddle-inspired leather, weighty buckles and straps drawn long, yet it stops well short of costume. The silhouette is tighter and more sculpted than its Western references would suggest, and harness-like details are engineered to wrap around the body rather than simply hang from a shoulder. This is a bag that wants contact with its wearer, which is a very Dsquared2 idea of seduction, and one its star appears to understand instinctively: when she signed on with the house, she praised the way it pairs “raw edge with pure elegance.”
It is also a bag with a memory. The design draws on Dsquared2’s Spring/Summer 2006 collection, a season squarely inside the era the campaign romanticizes, and even the logo lettering was lifted from an archival piece the Catens chose themselves. The Roxy had already surfaced in the house’s Pre-Spring/Summer 2027 collection, styled among cowboy hats, waist chains and logo-plaque belts, but the campaign is where it becomes a character. That archival thread matters. At a time when heritage is the most bankable story a label can tell, Dsquared2 is reminding the market that its own history is a genuine chapter of early-aughts pop culture, not simply a mood board of it.
Bad Gyal is the answer to why now. In June, after more than 30 years in business, the Catens named her the label’s first-ever global brand ambassador, and the Roxy is the most vivid expression of that partnership so far. Chiara Baravalle, the former Gucci executive who became Dsquared2’s chief executive earlier this year, told WWD the company wanted an artist “with staying power.” The singer, born Alba Farelo, fits the brief with unusual precision: she walked away from fashion design in 2016 to pursue music, and a decade later, riding the momentum of this year’s album ‘Más Cara’, she has circled back to fashion on her own terms.
The Y2K revival has been circling for years, and most of it has traded in the obvious: low-rise denim, tiny sunglasses, the return of the baguette. What Dsquared2 understands is that the era’s true product was visibility itself, the thrill of being spotted. The Roxy is built for exactly that condition. It is available now in Dsquared2 stores and on the brand’s website, and it has been designed, unmistakably, to be photographed on its way out the door.
