The distinctive sound of pencil scratching against paper is increasingly unusual in the world of fashion imagery, yet this half-forgotten sound opens Prada’s 2026 holiday campaign. Across a series of films for the Italian luxury house, woodland creatures, snow-covered landscapes and fantastical characters all come to life through the painstaking art of hand-drawn animation.
For the project, the Italian house tapped veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy, whose credits include The Land Before Time and Thumbelina. With each individual frame drawn by hand, the resulting illustrations are woven into live-action scenes featuring actors including Maya Hawke, Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr. Shot by photographer Glen Luchford, the campaign creates a winter fantasy that feels deliberately, enchantingly nostalgic.
“I learnt my craft with pencil and paper, old-school analogue drawing with pencil and paper,” says Pomeroy in the teaser video. For him, the decision to work by hand goes beyond sketching. “There’s a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that’s to see that there’s value in the human touch.”
It is a sentiment finding an increasingly receptive audience. As generative artificial intelligence increasingly conjures elaborate visual worlds in seconds, luxury brands are discovering that the narrative of the time, skill and labour behind a creation is as compelling as the finished result. The phenomenon has even acquired a name: effort signalling, or, in its more emphatic incarnation, effort maxxing.
It describes the deliberate display of human input and creative labour as a marker of authenticity and value. In a digital landscape crowded with synthetic imagery and what has become known as AI slop, the singular finesse of a human hand is emerging as a way for luxury houses to distinguish themselves.
Loewe took this labour-intensive approach to mark its 180th anniversary this year, commissioning illustrator Joanna Blemont and a team of artists to produce about 2,000 individual watercolour paintings for an animated film. The finished work is all too brief, but the production required an extraordinary investment of time.
The Spanish house has long made craftsmanship central to its identity and in early 2026 it released a capsule collection built around the eccentric cat drawings of Louis Wain. To round out this year, it has created another collection, this time built around Tim Burton’s stop-motion film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, suggesting that the process itself is half the story.
Hermès, too, is doubling down on its artistic collaborations. With a long lineage of commissioning artists to create window displays and literature for new-season arrivals, the house most recently approached French artist Linda Merad to illustrate its theme for 2026, Venture Beyond. The result was a website filled with drawings of her signature whimsical animals, left deliberately grainy to show her preferred printing method of lithography. Again, the messaging was clear: imperfections are the manifestation of human endeavour.
The maison also recently brought French woodworker Thibaut Malet on board to create a miniature version of its historic Paris flagship. During the initial discussions about the project, Malet explained how Hermès emphasised its commitment to craftsmanship and traditional know-how, as a counterpoint to the growing influence of AI.
Over at Chanel, meanwhile, creative director Matthieu Blazy called on illustrator Karlotta Freier to create a hand-drawn animated teaser for his autumn/winter 2026 haute couture show, itself inspired by illustrations from a book of fairy tales in Gabrielle Chanel’s library.
Even the beauty industry has embraced the idea. For its 2026 holiday collection, luxury haircare brand Oribe collaborated with French mosaic artist Mathilde Herrero, incorporating her work into its packaging and producing campaign films that reveal the process of assembling individual pieces.
As brands increasingly lean into the appeal of the hand-drawn, some brands are getting caught out in the shifting expectations. In December last year, Valentino drew criticism for using AI-generated imagery to promote its DeVain handbag, while Gucci encountered similar pushback in February this year for AI-generated imagery promoting Demna’s first runway show for the house, prompting debate about the place of technology in a business whose value rests so heavily on creativity and craftsmanship.
Consumers have a complex relationship with luxury goods. Beyond aesthetics and exclusivity, their appeal rests on the skill, craftsmanship and human effort behind them. Whether a bag, shoe or necklace, each piece represents access to generations of expertise, with its high price serving as both a mark of quality and a reflection of the work involved.
But this unspoken agreement has come under pressure in recent years. As prices have soared, with brands citing rising costs, consumers have grown increasingly vocal about perceived declines in quality.
In response, luxury houses are pulling back the curtain on their creative processes, inviting journalists into workshops and releasing behind-the-scenes footage of everything from hand-drawn campaigns to painstaking production techniques. The message is clear: human skill remains at the heart of luxury.
The issue is not necessarily that audiences object to technological innovation. Fashion has always embraced new tools, from digital retouching to computer-generated imagery. As part of its autumn 2015 haute couture collection, for example, Chanel debuted a 3D-printed jacket.
Audiences have no problem with accepting innovation; however, the growing unease centres around the spectre of AI replacing human jobs, and the possibility that brands are reducing their investment in human creativity while continuing to command luxury prices.
The latest house to feel the ire of consumers is Dior, whose illustrated Christmas campaign, called Christian Dior's Night of Colour and made in collaboration with French writer and illustrator Sylvain Chomet, is under scrutiny for potentially not being hand-drawn as described. Sharp-eyed viewers have flagged inconsistencies within the imagery, with the kinds of mistakes and duplication more typically seen in AI than in hand-drawn frames.
As the online debate rages on, of course, the issue is not so much if Dior did, or did not, use AI, or if the campaign is entirely hand-drawn as presented, or enhanced with digital imagery.
Rather, once again, this is high-end companies not being entirely truthful. Having been asked to place their trust in big names, customers are frustrated that brands are seemingly not holding up their side of the bargain.
Such light-hearted holiday campaigns should be an easy win for brands looking to re-establish deep links with clientele, tapping into the feel-good factor of the year's end. That such a cheerful moment has resulted in yet another PR headache underscores how complex the relationship between big brands and consumers has become.
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