In State of the Art, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas untangles the crossover between fashion and art.
“Josh O’Connor as The Chair” and “Rihanna as The Lucky Star” are two sets of words I never thought I’d see flash before my eyes. Especially not within the opening credits of a fashion brand’s holiday ad.
Yet this is no hallucination. Josh O’Connor really is Chair; Rihanna, a Lucky Star. (Or maybe we’re the lucky ones, for her agreeing to this?) Both have lent their vocal talents to an animated short film narrated by Robert Pattinson that also includes Greta Lee as one of the seamstress Bees, Camille Cottin as Marlene Dietrich, and Louis Garrel as… the inimitable Christian Dior.
This level of stacked talent makes Christian Dior’s Night in Color the fashion film equivalent of The Odyssey, and that extends to the person behind the lens: French animator Sylvain Chomet, best known for his Oscar-nominated films The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. It helps that nearly the entire cast happen to be Dior brand ambassadors, but there’s no denying that Jonathan Anderson — and, of course, Dior’s parent company LVMH — has popped off for the holidays.
Or has it? In the days since the ad debuted, animators in the field have alleged that hand-drawn illustrations were brought to life using AI, noting hands with one too many fingers and other wonky details. Coming so soon after Prada's own holiday ad, which recruited veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy and included an extensive behind-the-scenes companion video of the animation process, Dior's effort feels disingenuous to those who believe it's AI-assisted.
Whatever becomes of the short film, the fact that we're even debating it is a major step forward. Misstep or not, the idea that one of the world’s biggest luxury labels would blow its budget on an animated film would’ve felt like an aberration a few years ago. When Balenciaga partnered with The Simpsons in 2021 on a 10-minute “episode,” who could’ve guessed Marge pairing her blue ‘do with a bit of Demna couture would be the bellwether for a coming wave?
The times, they have a-changed: Rimowa went stop-motion for its newest ads (with short films reportedly set to release later this month) and LOEWE announced a Nightmare Before Christmas collection, plus Our Legacy teased its first standalone Tokyo flagship store via a very Akira-coded anime. Every day our January declaration that this would be the year of the fashion illustrator feels more and more prescient.
Animation and illustration have never been more prized in the industry, becoming key weapons in a brand’s “we love craft” arsenal — a repository that now includes everything from artisan awards like the Loewe Craft Prize and artist-fronted capsules like Lemaire’s Roland Topor collection to brand-backed print publications and sponsoring art shows, as Bottega Veneta has done for a Peggy Guggenheim exhibition opening this month in London.
In this kind of climate, a stunty animated film feels like a slam-dunk return on investment. It helps that these campaigns tend to look great (and sometimes even better than the wonky visuals we’d get from actual animated features).
And, in the case of Christian Dior’s Night in Color, the pairing is a perfect fit. Hand-drawing is a couture-level process in its own right, and the storyline draws on Dior’s very real history and lore: the designer really did call his atelier staff his bees, and he really did dress Dietrich for the silver screen.
Fashion has always sold a fantasy, and few visual mediums are more fantastical than animation. This might be the closest we get to Dior becoming our next Disney, or Prada our Pixar. But either way, fashion ads have never felt more alive.
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