• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, December 3, 2023

Saks is celebrating the holiday this year with a campaign called Dior's Carousel of Dreams. It is the first time the retailer has partnered with a luxury fashion house for the season.

The effort includes a Dior pop-up on Saks.com, a takeover of the Saks Fifth Avenue New York flagship and an online campaign.

“We are focused on inspiring customers in new and innovative ways, including through unique experiences in collaboration with our brand partners,” says Emily Essner, Saks’ chief marketing officer, in an email to Marketing Daily. With Dior, the retailer can offer products and experiences “catered to the full continuum of luxury consumers.”

Hooking up with Dior also makes sense, given affluent customers' current appetite for updated attire. “This holiday season, luxury shoppers are embracing getting dressed up and attending holiday parties and events,” she says. In the most recent Saks Luxury Pulse poll, fielded in October, 81% of respondents said they planned to buy new clothes for the holiday season.

The Dior pop-up on Saks’ site includes every category of Dior merchandise for men, women, and babies. It’s the first time Dior has allowed that to happen beyond its own ecommerce site.

The pop-up also features new exclusive products and an AR experience on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. “We’re pleased to bring the full assortment of Dior merchandise to our customers in a way that hasn’t been done before,” Essner says. “This partnership represents the strength of our relationships with the leading names in luxury fashion and our ability to execute an initiative at scale across the full Saks Fifth Avenue ecosystem.”

Essner says 64% of those surveyed plan to shop primarily or only online this holiday season, a hefty 15 percentage points higher than last year.

Inside the flagship, shoppers meet a carousel installation on the main floor, with one-of-a-kind Christian Dior haute couture dresses. The beauty floor features a Christian Dior Parfums pop-up with exclusive Dior makeup, fragrance, and skincare products.

The launch included the big reveal of Saks' holiday windows, which this year had a 10-story-tall theatrical light show, a performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company, clad in Dior, and an appearance by actor Jennifer Lawrence, a Dior brand ambassador.

The windows tell the story of Christian Dior’s dream journey from Paris to New York City, including the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Brooklyn Bridge and Rockefeller Center.

MasterCard has sponsored the windows for the last 14 years.

In daylight, the facade installation is a three-dimensional sculpture painted to achieve a gilded watercolor effect that catches sunlight. At night, the structure is lit from within to create a light show inspired by celestial and botanical elements of Dior’s designs.