Celine Winter 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Celine Winter 2025 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Charles Levai & Kevin Tekinel with Photographer Karim Sadli with models Jacqui Hooper, Rayssa Medeiros

For Winter 2025, Celine continues its finely tuned meditation on youth and attitude, this time under the direction of Charles Levai and Kevin Tekinel, with photography by Karim Sadli. Models Jacqui Hooper and Rayssa Medeiros front the campaign, embodying the brand’s ongoing fascination with nonchalant glamour and quiet defiance. At its best, Celine has always been less about spectacle and more about mood — and here, the mood is thick, cinematic, and confidently restrained.

The imagery leans into Sadli’s signature chiaroscuro: stark light cutting through shadow, the figures almost sculpted out of the atmosphere. The clothes — sharp coats, languid tailoring, softened leather — are not presented as mere garments but as talismans of an attitude. Hooper and Medeiros exude a kind of cool that doesn’t need to be named; it’s in the posture, the gaze, the refusal to perform for the camera even as the camera insists on their presence. It’s Parisian minimalism distilled, but with a dose of noir that makes the campaign feel less like a lookbook and more like a still from an unfinished film.

What works particularly well is the restraint. Unlike so many campaigns that drown the product in narrative clutter, this one edits itself down to essentials: light, clothing, atmosphere, attitude. The result is powerful because it trusts the viewer to fill in the rest — to project their own sense of story onto the space between image and imagination. Yet, in this confidence lies the campaign’s biggest gamble: by relying so heavily on mood, it risks becoming too insular, speaking only to those already fluent in the Celine lexicon. For audiences less attuned to this particular brand of cool minimalism, the starkness might read as aloofness.

Still, there’s an elegance in that choice. Celine under Hedi Slimane — and extended through Levai and Tekinel’s lens here — has consistently embraced exclusivity not as a barricade but as a kind of allure. You’re either in on the mood, or you want to be. That aspirational pull, captured in Sadli’s austere compositions, is what gives this campaign its power. If fashion is always a little about projection, Celine knows how to leave just enough unsaid for the imagination to do the heavy lifting.