From Prada’s hand-drawn winter wonderland to Dior’s seamstress bees and Bottega Veneta’s Moomins, luxury’s holiday campaigns have turned to animation. In an age of AI-generated perfection, the appeal is easy to see, but – as managing editor Josefin Forsberg ponders – the return to the handmade comes with a few catches
This holiday season, the luxury houses have reached for their pencils. In Drawing Prada, mice make off with Sadie Sink’s shoes and a snow lynx goes after Chen Haoyu’s bag, every creature hand-drawn under the direction of former Disney animator John Pomeroy. Dior has commissioned Sylvain Chomet, the filmmaker behind The Triplets of Belleville, to make Christian Dior’s Night in Colour, an animated short in which the seamstresses of the couture ateliers are, quite literally, bees. And Bottega Veneta has tapped the Moomins, promoting the capsule collection with a moving still.
In Sweden, animation is an essential part of the holidays. At 3pm on Christmas Eve, millions of Swedes sit down in front of SVT for Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul, an hour of Disney cartoons that has changed remarkably little since it first aired in 1960. Cinderella was always a personal favourite. Every year, she is fussed over by the same mice, making the same gown, in the same set of clips. Tamper with the running order and risk a public outcry. That hand-drawn nostalgia is, after all, unequivocally interlinked with Christmas.
And so, the timing of these animated Christmas campaigns makes sense. In 2026, when polished perfection is a prompt away, luxury has an awkward problem: perfect has become cheap. Audiences are reaching instead for the handmade, with stop-motion, collage, animation, and the perfectly imperfect. The Hungarian photographer Szilveszter Makó, with his surreal, painterly portraits – trompe l’oeil backdrops, a giant cardboard fork on fire – marks that same shift.