Dior’s 2026 holiday campaign is an animated short film directed by Sylvain Chomet, the French animator behind The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist.
Whether the industry follows will depend on whether the film sells handbags or merely admiration. Both are useful; only one is a business.
Luxury houses have been drifting toward animation for several seasons, drawn by the format’s ability to build a world without a location budget or a lighting rig. Chomet’s hand-drawn line, with its slightly bulbous proportions and ink-heavy shading, is the opposite of the polished CGI that usually results.
The cast is vocal rather than visible: Rihanna, Robert Pattinson and Josh O’Connor are among the voices, lending the film a strange, starry intimacy that a photographed campaign could not produce.
Dior’s answer appears to be scale: a film long enough to be watched rather than scrolled, released early enough to accumulate before the gifting peak.
That choice matters. His work has always treated architecture and objects as characters, which suits a house whose identity is carried by a facade on Avenue Montaigne and a bow motif repeated for seventy years.
