Every November, the big luxury houses stage the same exercise: persuade us, in ninety seconds or a few photographs, that this is the year gifts matter more than ever. The surprise of 2026 is how many of them have reached for the same props. Pencils, plush animals, grand buildings full of people arriving for a party. Here is the season so far, and what it says about where luxury’s head is.
The year of the pencil
The clearest trend is the return of the human hand. Prada, the Milanese luxury house run creatively by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, has made “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand,” a campaign in which every animated figure was drawn frame by frame by John Pomeroy, a veteran cinema animator whose credits reach from Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too to Pocahontas. Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chen Haoyu and Luther Ford are photographed by Glen Luchford in lighting designed to match the illustrated worlds. Sink crouches beside mice carrying off a polka-dot loafer, Hawke faces a sly fox in a snowy forest, and a snow lynx has a role of its own. The shoe, reportedly a reissue of a 1995 Prada design, is the only item that behaves like a product.
Across the road, Dior, the Paris luxury house now designed by Jonathan Anderson, has released Christian Dior’s Night in Color, a seven-minute hand-drawn short directed by the French animator Sylvain Chomet and narrated by Robert Pattinson. It follows Monsieur Dior on one frantic night in the atelier at 30 Avenue Montaigne, rushing a dress to Marlene Dietrich for her Technicolor film. Louis Garrel voices Dior, Josh O’Connor a talking chair, Greta Lee an atelier bee, and Rihanna appears as the star atop a Christmas tree. The story links to Anderson’s cruise 2027 collection, inspired by cinema’s move from black-and-white to colour. Dior also has a second, more sugary campaign, in which its Avenue Montaigne store becomes a gingerbread house with Anya Taylor-Joy and Deva Cassel.
Two houses, one technique, in the same week. It could be coincidence. It is also hard not to read it as a response to a mood: online, one commenter on Prada’s film wrote “Finally something without AI,” and brands are clearly aware that labour made visible is now a luxury in itself. Pomeroy says the point of hand-drawing is to show the value of the human touch, and Prada has published behind-the-scenes footage to prove it.
Miu Miu, Prada’s younger high-end sister brand, takes a gentler route to the same place. Photographer Tina Barney gathers Gigi Hadid, Louisa Jacobson and others in a wood-panelled townhouse hung with wreaths, and the guests include plush bears, rabbits and geese, seated as if they had been invited. It is a portrait of bourgeois manners, upended with humour. Furry creatures are officially the season’s most reliable cast members.
Everyone is checking into somewhere
The second pattern is architecture: houses are selling a place before a product. Gucci, with Mariah Carey and a Harmony Korine film, turns a hotel into a stage, with staff scrambling for the Queen of Christmas’s arrival and the crystal-covered Butterfly collection arriving with her. Louis Vuitton, the house that began by packing trunks for rail travel, sets its campaign in a station, in photographs by Oliver Hadlee Pearch: the last five minutes before a grand departure, with friends reuniting, children playing and travellers hurrying with their luggage. Burberry, celebrating 170 years, fills Longleat House in Wiltshire with Pierce Brosnan, Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle Union and friends for a proper party, and a great deal of check. Marc Jacobs has Meg Stalter lost in a hotel looking for a party. Loro Piana offers a weekend at a snowy cabin, and Chanel takes its winter wardrobe to the Alps, as we saw this month.
Hospitality is the common language here. A hotel lobby, a train platform, a country house: all are places where strangers arrive, are welcomed and are changed. It is no accident that the same season gave us a hotel brand’s advent calendar.
Who is giving the gift?
A third thread is who stands behind the present. Some houses lean on families: Ferragamo casts Kris Jenner as matriarch and director of a fictional film in “The Joy of Loving,” its designer saying he thinks about pieces handed down through generations. Tiffany & Co. presents “Love Is a Gift,” with Amanda Seyfried and a short film in which a Bird on a Rock ornament passes between a Christmas in 1992 and today. Skims gathers the Kardashian-Jenner sisters in nostalgic holiday portraits. David Yurman has Michael B. Jordan, Yerin Ha and Inde Navarrette in a snowy Washington Square Park.
Others put celebrity at the centre. The Gucci–Carey pairing is the loudest, a seasonal ritual made into an advertisement. And some choose nobody at all. The Watches of Switzerland Group, the British retailer that is the UK’s largest seller of Rolex, Omega and Cartier, has launched “Brilliantly Given,” a multi-brand campaign across its Watches of Switzerland, Mayors and Betteridge showrooms, with outdoor media in New York, Miami and Greenwich. The pitch is the thought behind a gift, and the stars are the products: watches from Breitling, IWC, TAG Heuer, Zenith and others, jewellery from David Yurman, Messika, Mikimoto and Roberto Coin, plus pre-owned and vintage pieces through Analog:Shift and Betteridge Vintage & Estate. It is a retailer saying, in effect, that it is the one that knows what you should buy. And it is interesting that pre-owned appears in a holiday gift list at all, just as Audemars Piguet has moved to run its own resale. The tension between brand and retailer over the second-hand market is only beginning.
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The $218 calendar
The most inventive object of the season may be the smallest. The Luxury Collection, Marriott’s portfolio of distinctive hotels, has launched an advent calendar with the artist and food designer Laila Gohar, whom it calls its Epicurean Global Explorer. Behind its 24 drawers are chocolates by Casa Bosques, the Mexico City chocolate house, flavoured to evoke destinations in the portfolio such as Kyoto, Dubai and South Caicos, with illustrations by Joana Avillez. It costs $218, which works out at about $9 a door, and is sold through the brand’s boutique, Gohar World and pop-ups, inspired by old-world Parisian chocolate shops and Milanese apothecaries, at hotels in Paris, Nashville, Los Cabos and Singapore.
It is a lovely piece of brand thinking. A hotel group’s real problem is that its product, a stay, can’t be wrapped. The calendar turns 24 locations into a daily ritual and a gift, which trade observers describe as extending hospitality into shoppable products. It is also a calendar you can open on a Tuesday in December without leaving home.
A little scepticism
All this charm has a price. Hand-drawn animation, celebrity casts and country-house shoots cost far more than a few product photographs, and they arrive in a season when the sector is under pressure: Interbrand’s 2026 ranking showed fashion’s biggest names losing value as a group, and Gucci has been reported as losing sales. A holiday campaign is a bet that a story will do what discounts cannot.
There is also a risk of sameness. When two houses hire animators and several others invent friendly animals, the novelty fades quickly, and by next year the shorthand for craft will be something else. The campaigns that last will be those that make a buyer want a specific object: a loafer, a dress, a little box of chocolates.
Still, there is something warming in this year’s mood. After seasons of glossy minimalism, luxury is reaching for pencils, parties and furry guests, which is to say for the things that people actually remember about the holidays. We suspect the mice would approve.
