Tod's Holiday 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Tod’s Holiday 2025 Ad Campaign

Few brands understand the art of subtle storytelling quite like Tod’s. This season, the Italian House invites us aboard The Holiday Express — a visual journey that captures the allure of travel, nostalgia, and refinement. The short film, crafted around the legendary La Dolce Vita Orient Express, transforms the brand’s 2025/26 Holiday Collection into a moving tableau of timeless Italian elegance. In a year when fashion often seeks the futuristic, Tod’s leans into memory — and finds something freshly magnetic there.

The campaign unfolds like a series of postcards from a dream journey — vignettes stitched together by the rhythmic charm of the train and the quiet sophistication of its passengers. Each frame feels deliberate, as though designed to linger. The train’s corridors gleam with golden light; rich fabrics and glossy leather catch reflections like captured warmth. The atmosphere is pure Tod’s: discreet, tactile, and grounded in a kind of sensual order. What might, in lesser hands, become overly nostalgic, instead feels gently ironic — a wink to the grand tradition of Italian storytelling that balances sentiment with sophistication.

Central to The Holiday Express is its masterful attention to material. The collection reinterprets Tod’s icons — from the Winter Gommino ankle boot and classic Gommino loafer to the Di Bag Folio and T Timeless bag — through a wintry palette of caramel suede, snow-dusted shearling, and soft nappa leather. It’s a tactile feast, where craftsmanship becomes its own form of narrative. Each texture seems to whisper the brand’s ethos: luxury is not loud, it’s felt. In this, Tod’s reminds us that refinement is a sensory experience — one that cannot be rushed, only savored.

There’s an undeniable rhythm to the storytelling — a visual syncopation between motion and stillness, much like the experience of travel itself. The train motif, of course, is no accident: it speaks to progress without haste, elegance in motion, and the beauty of shared moments between destinations. Yet, beyond its romantic surface, the campaign also gestures toward Tod’s enduring philosophy — that true luxury lies in the everyday rituals we elevate through care and craftsmanship.

If there’s a critique to be made, it lies only in the campaign’s restraint. In an era defined by hyper-saturated spectacle, The Holiday Express feels almost meditative, its tone so hushed that one could miss its quiet subversion. But perhaps that’s precisely the point. Tod’s doesn’t chase attention — it earns admiration through understatement. And in doing so, it reclaims something rare in modern fashion: sincerity.

Ultimately, The Holiday Express is not merely a celebration of the holiday season, but a meditation on elegance as a state of being — a reminder that true style travels lightly, leaving traces of warmth and wonder in its wake. Like the train itself, it moves deliberately, never in a hurry, carrying with it the distinct hum of Italian savoir-faire.

Tod’s doesn’t just take us on a journey — it reminds us why we travel in the first place.