Dsquared2 Turns Barcelona Into Its Own Wild West for the Roxy Bag

Hugo Comte sends Bad Gyal running through her own hometown for Dsquared2’s new Roxy Bag campaign, with the Caten twins riding along for the joke.

Barcelona doesn’t usually play the Wild West. Dsquared2 asked it to anyway. Hugo Comte shot the label’s new campaign for the Roxy Bag across the city’s streets, splitting the story between two fictions that shouldn’t share a frame: a spaghetti western fantasy of dust and saddlery, and a paparazzi ambush lifted straight from the early 2000s. Bad Gyal, the label’s Global Brand Ambassador since June, and model Noah Brown play the couple caught mid getaway, moving through both worlds with the bag swinging between them like the one prop tying the whole bit together. Dean and Dan Caten, Dsquared2’s founders and creative directors, turn up for a cameo alongside her, the kind of wink the brand has built its whole personality around.

Signal. What happened: Dsquared2 released a new global campaign for the Roxy Bag on September 21, 2026, shot by Hugo Comte and starring Global Brand Ambassador Bad Gyal, model Noah Brown, and founders Dean and Dan Caten in a cameo. Exact object: the Roxy, an East-West saddle style shoulder bag with layered belt strapping and statement buckles, first shown at Dsquared2’s Resort 2027 presentation in May 2026 and already sold in ten leather, denim, and embellished versions. When and where: the campaign moves between a Wild West fantasy set and street level, paparazzi style shots on location in Barcelona, Bad Gyal’s home city. Source: Dsquared2’s own campaign rollout, corroborated by Metal Magazine’s Argentina edition ACERO and the Mexican outlet NEOMEN. Why it matters: it’s the first campaign to put Bad Gyal’s own city inside Dsquared2’s cowboy myth since her ambassadorship began, turning an accessory launch into the label’s clearest statement yet about what her presence is meant to do for it. Earlier DRIFT: none on Dsquared2 directly, though the label’s cowgirl campaigns, including a 2018 motel shoot starring Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, sit in the same lineage this one revives.

The whole thing turns on a hinge Comte keeps returning to across the images: the desert on one side, the asphalt on the other, and the Roxy sitting in the middle of both, refusing to pick a lane. It’s a tidy metaphor for what Dsquared2 has always sold, really: two clashing reference points staged like they were always meant to share a frame.

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The Roxy wasn’t invented for this campaign. Dsquared2 first put it on the runway back in May, at the label’s Resort 2027 show, where it showed up as an East-West silhouette wrapped in looping belts, sold from day one in ten different iterations spanning supple leather, worn in denim, and rhinestone versions built for after dark. WWD counted it among the collection’s two new hero accessories, filed alongside a heel called the Cosmo, and Vogue’s own runway coverage, relayed through Unpretty’s recap, singled the bag out by name the moment it hit the runway.

By the time Dsquared2 wrote its own copy for the bag, the pitch had sharpened into something closer to a dare. “Rodeo ready, the Roxy takes Dsquared2 to the Wild West,” reads the product description on Dsquared2’s own site, which closes with an invitation to saddle up. That’s a lot of confidence for an accessory barely four months old, but Dsquared2 has never been shy about staging its own mythology in real time, and putting Bad Gyal and Noah Brown through a Western fever dream this early in the Roxy’s life reads like a brand betting the story sticks before the bag has even finished its first season on shelves.

No price for the Roxy has surfaced publicly in any of its ten iterations. Resale and outlet listings put Dsquared2’s other handbag lines anywhere from around $260 to $1,400 depending on material and construction, which gives some rough sense of the bracket the Roxy likely sits inside, though nothing closer than that could be confirmed.

The Roxy debuted inside a collection that spent most of its runway time somewhere else entirely. Dsquared2’s Resort 2027 show, staged in Milan that May, traded the label’s usual Canadian references for something more Italian and Mediterranean inflected, per WWD’s own review, pairing sharp tailoring and preppy pencil skirts with slinkier, lace trimmed dresses and oversized eighties style coats. The Roxy and its cowboy attitude sat slightly apart from that mood, alongside a cocktail glass heeled mule called the Cosmo, which suggests the bag was always meant to carry its own reference point independent of whatever else the season was doing.

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Bad Gyal was born Alba Farelo in Vilassar de Mar, just outside Barcelona, in 1997, and the city has never really left her music. She broke through in 2016 with a Catalan language cover of Rihanna’s “Work,” built a cult following through mixtapes like Slow Wine and Worldwide Angel, and has spent the decade since folding dancehall and reggaetón into something distinctly her own, all while staying rooted in the same Catalan scene that first noticed her. Dsquared2 named her its first ever Global Brand Ambassador in June 2026, a title the Caten twins framed in a joint statement that called her “magnetic on stage and fiercely confident off it, she perfectly captures the Dsquared2 attitude.”

Shooting the Roxy campaign on her own streets rather than a studio or a generic backlot wasn’t incidental. Where Dsquared2’s ambassador announcement in June stayed mostly abstract, gesturing at shared values around music and self expression, the Roxy campaign gives the partnership somewhere concrete to stand. Barcelona becomes the second half of the campaign’s central trick: the Wild West is pure invention, but the city chasing after it is real, and it happens to be hers.

By 2017 she’d played her first Sónar festival slot to a bigger crowd than organizers expected, and by 2023 she was taking the stage at Barcelona’s own Palau Sant Jordi arena, the kind of hometown milestone that turns a local phenomenon into something closer to a civic one. Her catalogue runs from the debut album La Joia through this year’s Más Cara, a run of releases built with collaborators spanning Quevedo to Young Miko, and none of it has moved her out of Catalonia so much as it’s pulled the rest of the industry toward her.

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Noah Brown’s own path to this campaign runs through a different country and an unusually fast start. Born Noah Luis Brown in Basel, Switzerland, to a Swiss mother and Cuban father, he was scouted on Instagram by Zineta Blank of Zurich’s Visage Management and, a month later, opened the Louis Vuitton x Supreme menswear show in Paris at just 17, his first modeling job of any kind. A former ballet student, Brown has since built a résumé running through Vogue Italia, V Magazine, GQ, Versace, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, and Giorgio Armani, and he isn’t new to Dsquared2 specifically either, having walked the brand’s own January 2026 runway show ahead of this campaign.

Playing opposite Bad Gyal here puts him in the more conventional half of the story, the model built to move through both the Wild West and paparazzi registers without upstaging the ambassador he’s paired with. It’s a role that suits someone whose entire career started with getting noticed and then learning how to share a frame.

He’s kept a foothold in editorial work alongside the campaigns, including a V Magazine feature where he named ballet as the thing about himself people find most surprising, and a run of 2026 show credits stretching from Gucci and Brunello Cucinelli to Dolce & Gabbana, on top of the Dsquared2 booking.

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Dsquared2 reaching for cowboy imagery isn’t a new trick, and that’s sort of the point. Dean and Dan Caten’s Fall/Winter 2018 show, titled Rhinestone Rebel, sent models through a full Western co-ed collection of buckled belts, cow print leather, and lassoed embroidery, and the campaign that followed put Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner in a 1960s roadside motel as cowgirl outlaws shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Dsquared2’s own brief for the Roxy campaign points further back still, tracing the theme to the label’s Spring/Summer 2006 women’s show, staged in Milan in late September 2005, which the brand frames as built around saddlery, suede, horseshoe buckled belts, and spaghetti western codes.

That specific SS06 detail is harder to pin down independently. Modeling archives confirm Dsquared2 did stage a Spring/Summer 2006 show around that date, but a contemporary runway review spelling out the Western content hasn’t turned up beyond the Mexican outlet NEOMEN‘s own account, which this piece leans on for that connection. What’s easy to verify is that the Western well never really runs dry for this label. It’s shown up in resort collections, in pre spring lookbooks, and now twice inside a single calendar year, which suggests less a one off reference than a setting the Catens keep a permanent key to.

The Catens, twin brothers born Dean and Dan Catenacci in Toronto in 1964, spent a semester at Parsons in New York before landing in Milan in 1991, working for Versace and Diesel ahead of launching Dsquared2’s first menswear collection in 1994. Three decades in, the label’s whole identity still runs on the trick this campaign leans on: an outsider’s version of American iconography, filtered back through Italian tailoring and restaged just seriously enough to make the joke land.

 

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The photographer holding all of this together has his own well worn relationship with the past. Paris based Hugo Comte, trained first in architecture before turning to photography, has spent his career working in a hyper saturated, 1990s inflected register that made him the visual signature of Dua Lipa‘s Future Nostalgia era and a occur convincer with Bella Hadid, and his client list beyond music reads like shorthand for a certain kind of contemporary luxury image making: Prada, Valentino, Burberry, Bvlgari, Vogue Italia, and Vogue Paris.

Beyond the campaign work, Comte has spent the past few years building a body of work under his own name: a 2021 retrospective photography book pulling together the muses who’ve shaped his eye, a 2022 exhibition called Testament staged with stylist Ibrahim Kamara at Paris’s Galerie Hussenot, and, more recently, a knitwear capsule of his own design called Dear Nikita.

What Comte brings to Dsquared2’s early 2000s paparazzi conceit isn’t just technical polish. His whole visual language already lives somewhere just outside of time, which makes him a strange but logical fit for a campaign asking the viewer to hold two different decades’ worth of reference points in their head at once: a Wild West that never existed, and a mid 2000s tabloid moment that very much did. Between his eye and the Caten twins’ own appetite for restaging their own history, the Roxy campaign ends up being less about a new bag chasing relevance and more about a brand confident enough in its own mythology to keep telling the same story a little differently every few years.