For Christmas 2026, Dior sets aside the traditional language of advertising campaigns and entrusts an animated film with the task of telling its own imaginary world. The new short film is titled Christian Dior’s Night in Color, directed by Sylvain Chomet, the Oscar-nominated French filmmaker behind The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist.
Presented today, November 4, the project was created under the creative direction of Jonathan Anderson and weaves together haute couture, cinema and traditional animation, bringing back to the center one of the most interesting relationships in the Maison’s history: the one between Christian Dior and the actress Marlene Dietrich.
The story imagines a winter night in 1949 at 30 Avenue Montaigne, when a phone call from Hollywood interrupts the quiet of the atelier. On the other end is Dietrich herself, who needs a new dress for her upcoming film. The problem? The director has decided to abandon black and white in favor of color. A request that kicks off a race against time, with Dior and his atelier working to create a dress worthy of the diva.
The tale unfolds through a series of characters that turn the Maison’s most recognizable elements into protagonists of a small fairy tale. Christian Dior is accompanied by three bees, who represent the atelier’s seamstresses and recall the affectionate nickname the designer used for the women who worked at his side. Beside them appear a Médaillon chair, one of the symbolic objects of Dior’s history, and a lucky star that watches over the Parisian night.
The technique chosen by Chomet also makes the project particularly interesting. Far from the more contemporary digital animation, the director worked for months through an entirely hand-drawn process, reviving methods used in the 1940s. The characters are cut out, animated separately and then assembled onto the various backgrounds. A procedure that takes hundreds of hours of work and that, not by chance, has several similarities with the making of a haute couture dress: in both cases, the final result is the product of a multitude of gestures and attentions that often remain invisible.
The voice cast also helps make the short film a meeting point of cinema, fashion and pop culture. Robert Pattinson serves as narrator, while Louis Garrel plays Christian Dior and Camille Cottin lends her voice to Marlene Dietrich. Josh O’Connor is the Médaillon chair, LaKeith Stanfield plays the Hollywood director Ron, Nine d’Urso, Greta Lee and Nadia Tereszkiewicz voice the three bees, and Rihanna becomes the lucky star.
With Christian Dior’s Night in Color, Jonathan Anderson thus chooses to tell the story of the Maison’s legacy through a language different from that of the classic Christmas campaign. Animation is not merely a narrative frame, but becomes a tool for recovering characters, atmospheres and gestures from Dior’s history, transforming them into an illustrated universe. The project, moreover, does not stop at the screen: the film’s characters and settings will also arrive in Dior windows around the world, accompanying a holiday collection that includes clothing, accessories and home objects.
