Swedish Label Rodebjer Cast a Robotics Scientist in Its Latest Campaign

The internet lost its shit over Kenzo’s recent fragrance ad, which featured Margaret Qualley doing a frenetic dance around a palace to a song by dancehall star Assassin and Sam Spiegel, directed by Spike Jonze. I thought it was cute and fun and was happy it did not use sex to market the scent but the choreography was fine and a little too self-conscious. What can I say!

But today we get a new advert from Rodebjer, the excellent and covetable Swedish label designed by Carin Rodebjer. The model is modelly, but she’s not really a model at all; she’s Danica Kragic, a robotics scientist and Computer Science professor at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, and a choice reflecting Rodebjer’s focus on the individuality of powerful women.

The resulting clip is a little bit art school—watch it, you’ll see—but it’s also much better than your standard commercial, presenting Kragic in posey-poses but also showing her with robots as she discusses and embraces her various inconsistencies. She also tells us she’s a seamstress; she doesn’t tell us she’s the Vice Dean, whose latest published work is entitled “A Sensorimotor Learning Framework for Object Categorization.” I don’t know what that means!