The Campaign

In early 2026, Chanel released a new campaign featuring Margot Robbie the brand's ambassador since 2022 directed by Michel Gondry. The visual centrepiece: Robbie multiplies across the frame, each version of her occupying a different plane of the image, moving in choreographed synchrony. The reference is unmistakable to anyone familiar with Gondry's archive. In 2002, he directed the music video for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" a continuous circular tracking shot in which Kylie multiplies with each rotation of the camera, ultimately producing four simultaneous versions of herself navigating the same Parisian street. The video won a Grammy for Best Music Video. It remains one of the most technically inventive and visually distinctive pieces of commercial filmmaking of the 2000s.

Chanel did not quote it accidentally.

Michel Gondry: Why This Director, Why Now

Michel Gondry is French, which matters to Chanel. But Gondry is not simply French he is the director of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), the inventor of some of the most formally inventive music videos in the medium's history (Björk's "Human Behaviour", The White Stripes' "Fell in Love With a Girl", Daft Punk's "Around the World"), and a filmmaker whose work sits at the precise intersection of technical ingenuity and emotional accessibility that defines the best luxury advertising.

Gondry's visual language is characterised by analogue feeling in digital contexts work that looks like it required physical craft, not computational power. This is an increasingly rare quality in fashion filmmaking, where CGI overproduction has become the default and the results are visually impressive but emotionally cold. A Gondry campaign looks like something was built to make it. For a brand that manufactures its garments by hand in Parisian ateliers, that aesthetic alignment is not incidental.

The director choice signals three things simultaneously: cultural intelligence (Gondry is respected beyond fashion), craft values (his production methods are labour-intensive), and confidence (Chanel does not need to hire the most recognisable fashion director in the room it can hire the best filmmaker).

The Kylie Minogue Reference: Decoding the Quote

The multiplication visual Robbie splitting into multiple versions of herself is a direct quotation of Gondry's 2002 Kylie Minogue technique. To understand why Chanel would want this reference, you need to understand what "Come Into My World" means culturally in 2026.

Kylie Minogue in 2002 was at the peak of her second commercial ascendancy, following the 2001 "Can't Get You Out of My Head" period. The "Come Into My World" video was not a mainstream pop cultural moment in real time it was recognised primarily by a specific audience: people who pay attention to visual culture, who track directors across formats, who understand that a music video can be a serious work of art. That audience in 2002 is now approximately 35-50 years old. They are, with significant overlap, Chanel's primary commercial audience.

The quote works on two frequencies simultaneously. For the audience old enough to recognise it: a signal that Chanel understands the cultural moments that shaped them. For the audience young enough not to recognise it: a visually striking, formally inventive campaign that works on its own terms. This dual-frequency communication meaningful to the informed, beautiful to everyone is one of the hardest things to execute in luxury advertising and one of the most valuable when it lands.

Margot Robbie as the Vessel

Margot Robbie became Chanel's ambassador in 2022. The choice was not immediately obvious Robbie is Australian, not French; her public image is warm and physically accessible rather than the classical cool that defines Chanel's traditional ambassador archetype (Vanessa Paradis, Keira Knightley, Kristen Stewart).

What Chanel saw, and has been proven correct about, is that Robbie has the cultural range to carry Chanel's brand across multiple registers. The Barbie (2023) moment in which Robbie demonstrated an ability to be simultaneously popular culture's most visible figure and critically credible validated the ambassador choice in retrospect. A brand that wants to be both artistically serious and commercially dominant needs an ambassador who can operate in both registers. Very few people can. Robbie is one of them.

In the Gondry campaign, Robbie multiplying is not just a visual device it is a precise use of her particular brand quality. She is already multiple things at once: glamorous and accessible, French in aesthetic and Australian in energy, art-house credible and mainstream legible. The multiplication visual externalises what Robbie already is as a cultural figure. That coherence between the subject and the technique is why the campaign works.

What This Means for Chanel's Brand Strategy

Chanel in 2026 is navigating a specific challenge: maintaining desirability among its established UHNW and haute couture clientele while remaining culturally relevant to the next generation of luxury consumers who will sustain the brand commercially over the next 30 years. This is a tension every major luxury house faces, but Chanel faces it with particular acuity because its brand identity is so precisely defined "Chanel" means something specific, and that specificity is both its greatest asset and its most significant constraint.

The Gondry campaign solves the tension elegantly. It is not a youthification exercise there is nothing in the campaign that compromises Chanel's core luxury positioning. It is a cultural intelligence demonstration: Chanel is telling both its established clientele and the next generation that it occupies the same cultural space as the directors and references they respect most.

The underlying brand logic is straightforward: luxury brands that maintain cultural relevance across generational transitions do so not by chasing youth culture but by demonstrating that they understand the cultural history that the next generation is inheriting. A 28-year-old who discovers Gondry through this campaign and then goes back and watches the Kylie Minogue video has been given a reason to respect Chanel that goes beyond the product. That is what great brand advertising does it makes the audience feel that the brand understands them.

The Competitive Context

In the same 2026 cycle, Chanel's principal competitors are executing very different creative strategies. Louis Vuitton continues its celebrity-stacking approach multiple global ambassadors appearing in high-production, visually saturated campaigns that prioritise reach over cultural depth. Dior is investing heavily in its cinema partnership strategy through the Dior and Cinema programme, focusing on prestige film productions. Hermès remains committed to its craft-centric, ambassador-free visual language that prioritises the object over the celebrity.

Chanel's Gondry approach occupies a distinct position: it is ambassador-led (Robbie) but director-led in concept, culturally specific without being exclusionary, and formally inventive without being inaccessible. In a creative landscape where most luxury advertising is technically excellent and conceptually forgettable, that distinctiveness is commercially significant.

The campaign will be remembered. In luxury brand building, that is the primary metric.
ng specific about the brand's cultural intelligence and values.