Luxury Wants Whimsy Now?

A polished image is easy to encounter. A world with no convincing substitute is harder to make.

Chanel has filled the Grand Palais with giant flowers and vines. Dior is telling the story of Miss Dior through hand-drawn animation. Hermès has populated its digital world with illustrated plants, creatures and objects that seem to have lives of their own. They look close enough to suggest a shared creative source. There isn’t one.

Animation is hardly new to luxury fashion. But several houses are now arriving at unusually similar worlds: whimsical and filled with invented nature.

Chanel Fall 2026 Haute Couture show with the oversized flowers and climbing plants created for the set.

For Chanel’s Fall 2026 Haute Couture collection, creative director Matthieu Blazy began with a book of fairy tales found in Gabrielle Chanel’s library. The story moved between the clothes and the room around them: embroidered strawberries and vines on the garments, enormous flowers and vegetation in the set.

Dior Beauty, Miss Dior: A Story of Love and Perfume, 2026, with its illustrated flower-filled landscape.

Dior arrived nearby from a different direction. Its new Miss Dior film was made by Remembers, the French animation studio founded by Ugo Bienvenu and Félix de Givry. The film draws on Catherine Dior, Christian Dior’s sister and the woman behind the Miss Dior name, as well as Grasse and the roses already embedded in the perfume’s history. The codes are familiar. Their illustrated form is not.

Hermès, Venture Beyond, 2026. Illustration by Linda Merad.

For its 2026 theme, Venture Beyond, Hermès worked with illustrator Linda Merad on a world of unlikely plants, animals and objects, later animated with Quentin Klein. Hermès wanted the texture of Merad’s lithographic process to remain visible. Even on a screen, the image retained evidence of how it had been made.

Loewe has been playing in similar territory. A 2026 capsule built around Louis Wain’s eccentric cats carried his drawings through animation, knitwear, embroidery, objects and packaging. For the house’s 180th anniversary, another film was built from more than 2,000 hand-painted frames, with Joanna Blémont’s watercolours shaping its visual world. Illustration was no longer confined to a single campaign or product.

Loewe 180th Anniversary film, 2026. Watercolours by Joanna Blémont.

The resemblance loosens beyond these four houses. Louis Vuitton built an abstract landscape inside the Louvre for Super Nature. OMA turned the Palais d’Iéna into a fairy-tale winter forest for Miu Miu. Valentino's Spring/Summer 2026 show Fireflies was inspired by a 1941 letter from Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini to his friend Franco Farolfi, describing a night filled with fireflies. These projects don't share one visual language, but each alters nature before bringing it into the house’s world. It is enlarged, drawn, staged, relocated or invented.

Louis Vuitton Fall–Winter 2026, Super Nature, Louvre, with a set of geometric green forms and blue carpeting.

None of this means polished digital fantasy has disappeared from luxury or that technical accomplishment has lost its value. Impossible spaces, seamless surfaces and convincing digital worlds still require specialised labour and considerable budgets. But polish alone no longer communicates rarity as reliably as it once did. The finished look is now easy to encounter, even when the work behind it is not.

Miu Miu Fall–Winter 2026, with moss covering the runway and floral patterns wrapping the columns.

What separates these projects is therefore not whimsy by itself. Illustrated flowers, enchanted forests and eccentric animals are readily available visual languages. The distinction lies in how difficult each world is to detach from its source. Linda Merad’s lithographic texture belongs to a particular hand and process. Dior’s roses arrive through Catherine Dior and Grasse. Chanel’s giant flowers belong to the world Blazy is building around the house; outside it, they are simply giant flowers.

Luxury has always depended on things that resist easy substitution: a particular material, technique, place, history or point of view. Here, scarcity doesn't lie in animation or invented nature alone. It lies in the chain of references and decisions that makes one illustrated world harder to exchange for another. Nature reappears after being enlarged, drawn and staged until it could belong nowhere else. For now, that happens to look like mushrooms, forests, fireflies and animated flowers.

Opening image: Chanel Fall–Winter 2026/27 Haute Couture animated film. Illustration by Karlotta Freier.