The Underwear Brand Welcomes the Season of Giving with an Innovative Approach to Surreal and Cinematic Softness
By Mark Wittmer
Stockholm-based underwear and essentials brand CDLP has launched its Holiday campaign, an AI-powered winter daydream that provides key insight on how the technology is shaping the future of marketing innovation. The imagery was created in collaboration with AI creative studio Copylab, who referenced the brand’s previous campaigns and marketing communications while working to build a new vision of festive opulence.
With an uncannily photorealistic quality, the resulting series of portraits find their utterly comfortable, larger-than-life characters amid lavish vintage interiors – mansions with colonnades, gilt trim, and indoor swimming pools right in the living room. These spaces are fully done up with holiday spirit, with immense piles of wrapped gifts spilling out from under enormous Christmas trees. In the center of each of these tableaus, a character smiles or smolders in their CDLP pajama or underwear set, proudly holding the brand’s signature yellow box.
It was an exciting project to try to create images that follow a very characteristic look which CDLP has developed over the years, and see if we could match it, and even evolve it,” said Copylab’s creative director Carl-Axel Wahlström. “And we think we did it.”
That aspect of blending the brand’s consistent human touch with the new application of technology is a major factor in what makes the campaign feel so successful. At once effortless yet clever, the vast majority of CDLP’s campaigns are shot and produced by its co-founder and creative director Christian Larson and feature his friends and creative community, extending a sense of personal touch and carefully considered creative cohesion. By using generative AI technology to build off of this human foundation rather than radically departing from it, the brand maintains its signature visual perspective while reaping many of the benefits of an AI campaign.
And those benefits are many, from potentially spending a fraction of the cost of an IRL campaign with human models to faster turnover time as the logistical prep and editing processes are streamlined and centralized. But those cost-saving benefits would feel cold, calculated, and inhuman if real creativity didn’t remain a central aspect of the final image – and here CDLP has leveraged the technology to craft dreamlike set pieces that it would be impossible to access through traditional photography, balancing its human vision with a new festive fantasy.
That balance of leveraging technology for efficiency and economy while maintaining a strong creative identity is essential for a growing independent brand. As a brand with a focus on luxury underwear, loungewear, and swimwear, CDLP is also in a unique place when it comes to visual communication – these are products where how it feels to wear them is even more important than how it looks, which can be tricky to communicate visually. A brand with a full ready-to-wear collection is in an easier starting place when it comes to crafting aesthetic narrative and emotional connection out of the collection itself. Thus, that balance of consistency, creativity, efficiency, and innovation can be particularly powerful for a uniquely positioned brand like CDLP. In this connection, another example of the brand’s subtle thoughtfulness in crafting the campaign is the presence of its packaging, which anchors the images with a tangible emblem of the brand’s physical identity – as well as further connecting with the joy of gift giving.
Synthesizing a deep understanding of the human touch at the core of its brand identity while translating it through a strategic use of an exciting technological innovation, CDLP concocts a clever marketing moment just in time for the season of celebration.
