Are Ad Campaigns So Back?

On the fourth day of TNG Blogmas, a look at how several fashion brands energized the end of the year with a burst of creativity (and emotion!) at the buzzer.

Balenciaga’s Le City Bag campaign by Lauren Greenfield

Welcome to TNG Blogmas! In the spirit of the holiday week, I’ll be publishing a short blog every day unpacking a topic that’s at top of mind as we head into 2025.

An exercise that every digital editor is familiar with at the end of each year is prepping stories to go live between Christmas and New Year’s Day, so that you can log off for as long as humanly possible before the Awards Season and Fashion Month cycles start anew. One tried and true piece of annual content is a roundup of the best ad campaigns from the past 12 months — a real crowd pleaser! Even though I no longer have to write or edit these, I still took some time during the holiday lull to look back at what brands had to offer.

Very few of 2024’s ads stick out in my memory; much of the output felt formulaic, featuring a mega-model like Kendall Jenner giving us varying degrees of nothing. Casting someone very beautiful can still result in extremely boring images! There were some bright spots, like Saint Laurent, which cast Bella Hadid, Chloë Sevigny, and Gwyneth Paltrow in sexy leather, lace, and suiting looks this fall, as well as friends of the house reading in a video campaign based on the book “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust. (I discussed the fashion industry’s literary fixation at length on the pod in July with

Sophia June

, linked below ICYMI.)

Luckily, a few fashion houses energized the end of the year with a much-needed burst of creativity at the buzzer.