Oliver Hadlee Pearch shoots the maison's 2026 holiday campaign in a snowy station, where the best part of the trip is the countdown. The trunk stays close.
Louis Vuitton has picked the most exciting five minutes of any journey for its holiday season: the ones just before the train leaves. The Louis Vuitton holiday campaign for 2026 is set in a snowy station, and the brand’s message is that here the journey is the destination.
Photographer Oliver Hadlee Pearch shot the campaign, which the house says celebrates “the magic of reunions and the excitement of departure.” It breaks on Thursday on Vuitton’s website and social platforms.
A station, a soundtrack, a countdown
The film is directed by Rubberband, the duo of Jason Filmore Sondock and Simon Davis. It plays out to Joe Jackson’s 1980s hit “Stepping Out,” a song with a good sense of forward motion. The story is told in small moments: chance encounters, playful beats and a clock running down to departure. It all sits under the house’s long-running Art of Travel tagline, which is the thread that has tied Vuitton’s work together for as long as there have been trunks to pack.
The product is the usual Vuitton cargo of leather goods, luggage, accessories, sneakers and jewelry. In one of the ads, a model wears the Carré LV En Fleurs silk scarf, which is easy to imagine knotted at a station on a cold morning.
Ghesquière’s train playlist
The theme has a clear starting point in Nicolas Ghesquière’s fall 2025 womenswear collection. For that show, he asked members of his design team to name their favorite films involving trains. The answers included “Brief Encounter,” “2046,” “Snowpiercer” and “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” That is a wide-ranging list, and it shows how many different stories a railway can hold: romance, mystery, fantasy and a good deal of luggage.
The idea also fits the wider LVMH group. Its strategic partnership with French hotelier Accor is meant to speed up the development of the Orient Express brand across trains, hotels and sailing ships. The group has a real interest in luxury travel, and a holiday film about a railway station sits comfortably beside it.
Five worlds and a wooden trunk
The train carries on into the holiday windows, which present five worlds: the Alpine Horizon, the Big Apple, the Blossom Garden, the Moonlight Valley and the Golden Dunes. Miniature trains run from one landscape to the next, so a passer-by can follow the route from snow to city to flowers to desert. In most Vuitton stores, the Christmas trees will have train garlands winding through their branches.
The trunk, the object the house was built on, gets its own moment in Tokyo. On Saturday, Vuitton opens an immersive pop-up at its Shibuya store with a series of miniature worlds. One room shows products in a setting inspired by a wooden trunk. The ads cover the departure, and the pop-up shows what goes in the luggage.
Burgundy for the journey
There is a beauty chapter too. The Louis Vuitton La Beauté holiday capsule is inspired by the Monogram Rouge lipstick shade and has five products. They come in burgundy lacquered cases decorated with hand-painted Monogram flowers. One of them is a new matte version of the lip color. A line of canvas accessories in a similar red follows. The campaign images include a burgundy vanity bag holding special edition LV Monogram Rouge lipsticks and an LV Ombres palette.
Holiday campaigns often rely on glitter and big gestures. This one relies on a smaller feeling that most travelers know: the platform, the cold air, a hand on a suitcase handle and the wait for the whistle. Vuitton has always sold that feeling, and this season it has put it on a station platform.
Via WWD
