Known for British restraint, Garfield is the deliberate foil in a campaign built on Ellesse’s Italian identity: a three-chapter narrative launching in June and rolling out through SS26 and AW26 across film, out-of-home and social formats.
Ellesse has unveiled its new global campaign, deploying actor Andrew Garfield as the face of a creative repositioning the brand calls a shift in direction.
The campaign, titled Do It Like An Italian, is structured as three cinematic chapters. The first, Say It Like An Italian, draws on the label’s 1980s and 1990s archive and signature silhouettes. In it, Garfield, known for his role in The Amazing Spider-Man and The Social Network, and for a distinctly understated British register, is coached through Italian pronunciation, starting with the brand name itself.
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Two further installments, Play It Like An Italian and Style It Like An Italian, are scheduled for global release later this summer. The full rollout begins in June and runs across film, stills, out-of-home, social-first content and cultural activations through the Spring/Summer 2026 and Autumn/Winter 2026 seasons. The campaign was shot by British photographer and filmmaker Oliver Hadlee Pearch
The Brit as honorary Italian
The casting choice creates intentional friction. Garfield, as a cultural foil rather than a cultural native, works through the Italian identity the brand embodies – language, movement and style – with charmingly mixed results. It is a soft-power play on the kind of Italianness that still travels: sport, fashion, food and the general art of making life more enjoyable.
Garfield said he and his friends grew up “coveting and wearing” Ellesse, lending the campaign the nostalgic credibility the device depends on.
Part of a broader pattern
The campaign joins a discernible trend in sporting goods marketing: the systematic return to heritage. Across brands, creative strategies are reaching back for visual and emotional anchors to the seventies, the eighties and the nineties. Whether the reference point is the velour tracksuit, the Grand Slam court or the latest FIFA World Cup activations, nostalgia has become strategy. For understandable reasons: in an age of polycrisis and uncertain futures, the past has always been the easiest refuge.
