Holiday 2025: Burberry’s star parade, Guerlain’s perfume moment, Louis Vuitton’s pretty silence

If your holiday campaign skips the scent, is it even a holiday campaign? This week’s trio proves the point. Burberry drops a glittering winter vignette fronted by Jennifer Saunders, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Ncuti Gatwa, Naomi Campbell, and Son Heung-min for Holiday 2025. High wattage, high polish, and yes, highly wearable clothes. But for a house with such a fragrance legacy, the mood feels fashion-first with fragrance reduced to background noise. It’s charming. It’s chic. It’s also a little scentless.

Then there is Guerlain, the only one in this set that actually shows a perfume. Imagine that, a holiday film that gives airtime to the bottle and the juice instead of burying it behind snow-globe aesthetics. Guerlain understands that perfume is the emotional engine of winter marketing. One spritz can turn a party into a memory, and they play to that truth with unapologetic focus on the object of desire. No coyness, no cutaway. Just perfume doing what perfume does best, which is seduce the camera and the wearer in equal measure.

Louis Vuitton arrives with a dreamy, varnished fantasy that is beautiful to watch and easy to forget once the credits roll. The craft is impeccable, the visuals buttery and bright, and yet fragrance feels like an afterthought. When a brand can command the world’s attention in a 30-second slot and still not lean into scent, it tells you where priorities sit.

As a woman who lives and breathes this industry, I’m not asking for nostalgia, I’m asking for nerve. Holiday 2025 should be the Super Bowl for perfume. Guerlain brings the courage of a maison that knows its bottle is the star. Burberry brings celebrity charisma that deserves a perfume cameo to match. Louis Vuitton brings cinematic gloss that begs for a fragrance heartbeat.

Trend check for the season: fashion-led houses are banking on faces and mood, beauty-led houses are banking on the bottle. Only one of those approaches leaves a trail on your scarf in January. If you want your holiday spot to be remembered, let the perfume speak. Guerlain just did. Burberry and Louis Vuitton, the stage is yours.