In the 2026 Pirelli Calendar, the elements take human form – wind, fire, water, earth and ether are embodied by a cast of iconic women. Tilda Swinton becomes flowers and plants, a forest-born myth, Venus Williams embodies fire, FKA twigs channels earth; Isabella Rossellini carries nature, vibrant and alive, and Irina Shayk is wind, invisible, restless, shaping everything it touches.

Photographed by Norwegian-born, London-based Sølve Sundsbø, The Cal 2026 reframes the calendar as a living ecosystem rather than a sequence of images. Part meditation, part atmospheric experiment, it locates sensuality not in display but in the accumulated experience of women who have lived, endured, and evolved – both publicly and privately. Sundsbø has long been drawn to that Romantic idea, explored by painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, where humanity and landscape collapse into one another. The elements, in this calendar, operate less as metaphor than as condition: longing, curiosity, gravity, release.

“The Calendar isn’t really about earth, wind, fire, water,” Sundsbø tells us. “It’s a way of connecting us to where we come from.” Through this ethos, the calendar inhabits an intentional in-between: shot in studios in London and New York, infused with footage captured in the English countryside of Norfolk and Essex, projected across XR volumes, filtered through fabric, light and movement. Nature is present, but as an idea – remembered and reassembled.

Irina Shayk’s element, wind, presented a particular challenge. Invisible by nature, it required a physical language to exist on camera. Fabric, movement and projection became its stand-ins. For Shayk, the initial difficulty was conceptual. A self-described Capricorn – “very earthy, very stubborn, very grounded” – she struggled to see herself reflected in something defined by restlessness and unpredictability. As the shoot unfolded, that resistance dissolved. The studio transformed into what Shayk describes as a “magic space,” allowing moments to surface without instruction.

“Even the steady mountain needs a little shaping at the edges,” Shayk reflects. Wind, she realised, does not oppose earth; it completes it. What emerged was less a performance than a surrender. For a model with decades of experience in front of the camera, the process felt unusually alive. “It was more about connecting with your inner self than just beauty,” she says. “You let it go. You stop being robotic. You’re part of something bigger than just the picture.”

That release moves through the calendar as a whole. Wind carries. Fire flickers. Water submerges. Earth holds. Each element is tied not to costume or environment, but to an emotional state: freedom, desire, tension, grounding. Movement becomes the shared language, a reminder that nothing remains fixed. “The dynamic of life is movement,” Shayk says. “Nothing stays in one place.”

This preoccupation with flux mirrors the evolution of the Pirelli Calendar itself. Now in its 52nd edition, The Cal has long since moved beyond its early associations with provocation and glamour. Over time, it has quietly become a register of shifting ideas around beauty, power and representation. The Cal 2026 continues that trajectory by refining sensuality.  For Shayk, standing alongside women whose bodies and careers visibly carry time feels both grounding and quietly radical. “It’s a celebration of who we are from the inside,” she says. “Our soul more than how we look.”

The making of the calendar reflects that interior focus. Sundsbø deliberately resisted photographing exclusively outdoors, wary of idealising nature as spectacle. Instead, he embraced hybridity: capturing real landscapes, clouds and sunsets, then reintroducing them into the studio through moving image and projection. The effect is immersive and viewers are positioned not as observers, but as participants drawn into environments that seem to breathe and shift in real time. “It should feel like you’re interacting with it,” Sundsbø says. “Because you are.”