Dior Skips the AI Holiday Ad and Hand-Draws a Love Letter to Marlene Dietrich Instead
While AI-generated spots flood everyone's feed this holiday season, Dior went the opposite direction: a hand-animated short film starring Rihanna, Robert Pattinson, and Camille Cottin, directed by the filmmaker behind The Triplets of Belleville.
Dior just released its 2026 holiday campaign, and it looks nothing like the generative-AI spots flooding everyone else's feed this year. "Christian Dior's Night in Color" is a hand-drawn animated short directed by Academy Award winner Sylvain Chomet, the filmmaker behind The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, with creative direction from Dior's Jonathan Anderson.
The cast leans into star power as much as craft: Louis Garrel plays Christian Dior himself, Camille Cottin plays the designer's real-life friend Marlene Dietrich, Josh O'Connor voices a talking chair, and Rihanna plays a magic Christmas star, with Robert Pattinson and Greta Lee rounding out the cast. Set in 1949 Paris, the plot turns on a call from Dietrich, who needs a gown for her first color film, and the atelier that scrambles to deliver it.
Dior isn't alone in going analog this season: Prada released its own hand-drawn effort, "Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand," the same week. Two of fashion's biggest houses choosing pencil and paint over a prompt box, in the same holiday season everyone else reached for AI, is its own kind of statement: when your whole brand is built on craft and heritage, outsourcing the holiday ad to a machine is the fastest way to undercut it.
Source: TheWrap
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
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