Celine 'Hiver' 2026 Ad Campaign

Review of Celine ‘Hiver’ 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Charles Levai, Kevin Tekinel with Photographer Zoë Ghertner with models
Alaina Rae, Esther Kim, Faith Johnson, Frej Larsen, Janou Bennink, Kylee Dixon, Maya Cisse, Milo Flaviani, Viktoria Wirs

Celine Hiver 2026 is an exercise in making a new era legible. Under Michael Rider, with campaign creative direction by Charles Levai and Kevin Tekinel, photographer Zoë Ghertner and filmmaker Massimiliano Bomba translate the collection’s central proposition into image. Clothes gather meaning through the people wearing them, and personal style carries the argument. The campaign feels confident in its refusal to overexplain, trusting proportion, posture, and instinct to establish Rider’s evolving Celine.

Slender tailoring, cropped trousers, layered knitwear, imposing scarves, and deliberately eccentric accessories form a wardrobe where French bourgeois polish meets American sportswear ease. Ghertner photographs these elements with an alert naturalism, moving between Parisian streets and intimate interiors while shifting from grainy monochrome to warmer color. The images accumulate their authority quietly. Each character appears caught within a life already in progress, giving the collection a sense of use, personality, and social intelligence.

That clarity is the campaign’s strength, and it exposes its pressure point. Naturalistic photography has become one of luxury’s most persuasive forms of visual shorthand, communicating taste through apparent spontaneity and carefully managed ease. As more houses adopt the same language, distinction depends on the specificity of the world surrounding the clothes. Ghertner’s photographs are polished, intelligent, and commercially exact, though their cultivated anonymity occasionally allows familiarity to precede singularity.

Rider inherits a house shaped by two highly recognizable modern histories: Phoebe Philo’s intellectual pragmatism and Hedi Slimane’s youth-coded rock austerity. His own vocabulary is emerging through mature character, American polish, unusual combinations, and clothes designed to shift the wearer’s posture. Hiver 2026 communicates that proposition persuasively as a wardrobe. Its mythology remains quieter, perhaps strategically so, as Rider gives continuity time to settle around his vision.

The campaign identity’s next task is to claim unmistakable authorship within this crowded visual field. Celine now knows how it wants to dress, and Rider has given that wardrobe coherence, wit, and considerable appeal. The open question is whether the house’s imagery can develop a personality as distinctive as the characters it celebrates.