Apple’s long-running “Shot on iPhone” campaign has moved into fashion, and its latest showcase puts the new iPhone 18 Pro Max to work on a runway show staged among the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, with three giant hot-air balloons overhead.
The show belongs to Bünyamin Aydın, founder of the Istanbul streetwear label Les Benjamins, which marks 15 years with a collection called “From Earth to Sky.” It is a 10-look capsule built around three wildflowers Aydın found in Cappadocia’s Rose Valley: globe-headed Echinops, a pink trumpet-shaped bloom, and wild yellow tulips. Those same three flowers set the colours of three custom balloons in neon green, yellow and pink, which local operator Pasha Balloons engineered so they could fly.
Aydın, who was born in Germany to Turkish parents, has long framed the label as a meeting point between Western tailoring and Anatolian craft. Here that means modern silhouettes cut from Turkish fabrics, Silk Road references, and an opening look that pairs a caftan with a tree branch as a nod to Barış Manço, the Turkish rock figure whose 1970s style also shapes the collection.
The tech story is the reason this campaign exists, and Apple leans on it heavily. Aydın says he designed much of the collection on an M5 iPad Pro with Apple Pencil Pro, using Freeform for shared mood boards and Procreate to iterate dozens of balloon shapes down to three. He credits the Pencil’s hover preview and the tablet’s handling of large layered files, though those are a designer’s impressions in a sponsored project, not independent benchmarks.
Filming fell to French director Neels Castillon. According to Apple, the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s 48MP Fusion main camera now has a variable aperture, which let the crew begin shooting in pre-dawn light and stop down as the sun rose. Variable aperture is a feature iPhone has historically lacked and Android flagships have used before, so this is one of the more practical additions to this generation. Footage was recorded in 4K at 120 frames per second and in ProRes RAW, with drones carrying two iPhones each, plus stills using new grain and texture controls in Photographic Styles 3. Edits were reviewed on location on an M4 Max MacBook Pro.
