Jil Sander's first ever China-dedicated brand communication. A Chinese New Year campaign built around restraint instead of spectacle.
For its first ever China-dedicated brand communication, Jil Sander came to Bureau Béatrice with a clear ambition and an open question: how do you speak authentically to a Chinese audience without losing the minimalist rigour that defines the house?
Simone Belotti's Jil Sander is a study in restraint — functional beauty, considered materiality, quiet confidence. The brief was to translate that sensibility into a Chinese New Year context in a way that felt genuinely rooted, not cosmetically adapted.
What was expected. Chinese New Year campaigns typically lean on red and gold, dragon iconography, family reunion tableaux, bold festive energy. Audiences and clients have been conditioned to anticipate a very specific visual grammar.
What we chose to do. We rejected the template entirely. Instead of dressing a Western brand in Chinese costume, we looked for the universal within the specific — the intimate, almost meditative rituals that structure the New Year for ordinary people.
"The rituals are the story." Internal note · Bureau Béatrice
The film is called Rituals. The idea grew from a simple observation: Chinese New Year is less a single event than a constellation of small, repeated acts. Peeling a mandarin orange. Burning incense at dusk. Laying out clean clothes the night before. Calling a friend you haven't seen in a year. Watching fireworks from a rooftop.
These are the gestures that connect the personal to the collective — and they map precisely onto Simone Belotti's design philosophy: deliberate, sensory, quietly intentional.
The film doesn't explain Jil Sander. It shows what Jil Sander feels like in China, in winter, at the turn of the year.
A deeply observational camera. Long takes. Real locations around Shanghai. No artifice, no festive props. The warmth comes from the light, the gestures, the pauses between actions.
The photography deliberately broke with the visual vocabulary Chinese audiences expect from luxury CNY campaigns. Instead of opulence and celebration, the stills explore stillness — a wrapped gift on a wooden chair, a candle being lit, an empty doorway. Objects that carry the weight of anticipation.
Each image functions as a standalone statement, with product rarely centred, often incidental. The frame is always doing more than presenting.
4.2K likes on RED — a strong signal for a campaign that broke from category convention.
1.9K saves on WeChat. The high save rate, users returning to the content rather than scrolling past, is the quality indicator that mattered most. People came back to it.