Paris Hilton is staying with Karl Lagerfeld for two more campaigns, and this time she is sharing the frame with a new digital character called Not-Karl. The fall 2026 campaign, shot by Matt Easton, broke Tuesday across digital, print, social media and outdoor.
Pier Paolo Righi said Hilton’s first two campaigns helped the brand’s business in “a very tangible way” across every region of the world, and that they helped it keep growing in an increasingly challenging environment. He also said she was “not an obvious choice — and that was precisely the point. It made people stop and take notice.”
Fall 2026 with Not-Karl
The fall 2026 work puts Hilton beside stacks of retro TV sets broadcasting Not-Karl, a setup that makes the campaign look less like a simple celebrity image play and more like a serialized brand story. Hilton also appears in a short black-and-white video sparring with the character, asking, “But you sound like Karl” and “You just look a little different.”
Not-Karl answers, “I like to reinvent myself.” That line fits the brand’s own explanation for the project: Righi said the idea was to find “a completely new way of bringing some of Karl’s spirit back into the conversation,” while using a tool that is as forward-looking as Karl himself always was.
Paris Hilton and Karl Lagerfeld
The pairing now covers fall 2026 and spring 2027, after Hilton fronted the fall 2025 campaign and the spring 2026 campaign. That gives Karl Lagerfeld a two-season extension with a face that the company says was never the obvious pick, but worked because it was unexpected, provocative and culturally relevant.
Righi said Hilton has made the partnership “very personal” and “loves being an integral part of Karl’s future legacy.” He added that she “genuinely loves the brand and was wearing our collections long before our partnership began,” which is the kind of detail that makes the alliance feel less like a one-off booking and more like a recurring brand asset.
Not-Karl’s synthetic voice
The sharpest wrinkle is that Karl Lagerfeld says it is not trying to recreate Karl, even as it built a digital character whose voice, accent, intonations and blunt manner closely echo him. The company says the voice is synthetically generated specifically for the character, but the precise technology behind the digital appearance stays under wraps.
That leaves the campaign in a useful middle ground for the brand: recognizable enough to carry the legacy, distant enough to avoid pretending to be the real person. Hilton’s line — “But you sound like Karl” — does a lot of the work here, because it puts the resemblance right into the story without the company having to explain every layer of how the character was made.
The practical takeaway is simple: Karl Lagerfeld is treating Hilton as a long-term face, not a seasonal guest, and it is building its next phase around that familiarity plus a synthetic side character. If the campaign keeps rolling the way Tuesday’s launch suggests, the real test will be whether Not-Karl reads as a clever extension of the brand or as a distraction from Hilton herself.
