BTB BRAND SPOTLIGHT: Few people understand the business of family quite like Kris Jenner. Over nearly two decades, the Kardashian-Jenner matriarch has helped transform the private lives of her children into a global entertainment empire, turning family relationships into an extraordinarily valuable form of cultural currency. So when Italian luxury house Ferragamo enlisted Jenner for its Holiday 2026 campaign, The Joy of Loving, the casting was at once surprising and strangely fitting.
In The Joy of Loving, Jenner plays a role she knows intimately: director. Only this time, rather than orchestrating the lives and careers of her famous daughters, she presides over a series of screen tests featuring real families, friends and creative collaborators. Model Paloma Elsesser appears alongside her brother, Sage. Actress Joan Chen shares the frame with her daughter, Audrey Hui. The Womack Sisters bring their musical sisterhood, while British band Bar Italia appears alongside stylist Ch’lita. Elsewhere, acting coach Nancy Banks joins her son, actor Benny Buckley, and Sofia Testino appears with her dog, Syko. Directed by Clara Cullen and photographed by Ilya Lipkin, the campaign unfolds through intimate portraits, conversations and moments of affection. Ferragamo’s handbags, shoes and accessories appear throughout, though the relationships, rather than the products, remain the principal attraction.
There’s something wonderfully self-referential about placing Jenner behind the camera. Here is a woman who has spent much of her professional life overseeing the performance of family intimacy, now directing a campaign that celebrates its authenticity. It also raises an interesting question about what authenticity means in contemporary culture.
The Kardashian-Jenner empire has long blurred the boundaries between private relationships and public entertainment. Family disagreements, celebrations, marriages and milestones have all become part of a carefully constructed cultural narrative. That doesn’t necessarily make the relationships any less real, but it does make their presentation inseparable from the machinery of celebrity.
Ferragamo plays with a similar tension, albeit more gently. Its cast members share genuine relationships, yet the audience encounters those relationships within a meticulously staged production. The screen tests, theatrical framing and Jenner’s directorial role acknowledge the artifice rather than pretending it isn’t there. Perhaps that’s what makes the campaign feel distinctly contemporary. We have become accustomed to experiencing intimacy through a camera lens, whether through reality television, social media or the carefully curated photographs of our own lives. Even the most personal moments now exist somewhere between lived experience and public performance.
When Heritage Meets Popular Culture
Jenner’s presence also signals something about the shifting cultural language of luxury. For decades, heritage houses could rely on a relatively established vocabulary of aspiration: Hollywood glamour, European aristocracy, artistic patronage and the understated authority of old money. Today, luxury’s cultural references are far more democratic, even when its products remain anything but.
Celebrity entrepreneurs, reality television personalities and digital creators occupy spaces once reserved for film stars and fashion royalty. Their influence is not necessarily derived from artistic accomplishment or inherited social standing, but from their ability to command attention and cultivate audiences.
Jenner embodies this shift perhaps more completely than almost anyone. Her casting is not without risk. For consumers who associate Ferragamo with discretion and traditional Italian elegance, the Kardashian-Jenner universe may feel an uncomfortable fit. The public response to the campaign has reflected some of that unease, with online commentators questioning whether the association enhances the house’s desirability or dilutes its identity.
Yet the tension is arguably what makes the choice worth examining. Ferragamo could easily have selected a conventional Hollywood icon to tell a story about family. Instead, it chose a woman whose public identity is almost entirely bound up with the commercial power of her own.
There is a further connection to the house’s history. Before Ferragamo became synonymous with Italian luxury, Salvatore Ferragamo made his name in Hollywood, creating shoes for the stars of the silver screen. The campaign’s cinematic framing, from its screen tests to its fictional film premiere, offers a playful reference to those beginnings. In a sense, the house is returning to Hollywood. Only the definition of stardom has changed.
The Things We Keep
Beneath the celebrity casting lies a more traditional Ferragamo story. At just nine years old, Salvatore Ferragamo made his first pair of shoes for his sister Giuseppina’s First Communion when his family could not afford them. He would go on to become the Shoemaker to the Stars, creating footwear for Hollywood icons before his wife Wanda and their children carried the business into its next chapter.
Nearly a century later, The Joy of Loving returns to that original sentiment: the idea that beautiful objects acquire meaning through the relationships surrounding them. By placing its accessories within moments of family intimacy, Ferragamo presents them not merely as possessions, but as potential heirlooms.
There is a familiar paradox here. Luxury brands must continually sell new products while promising they are worth keeping forever. The holiday season only amplifies that contradiction, wrapping consumption in the language of love and generosity. Ferragamo makes the connection elegantly, presenting the gift as an expression of affection and the object as a vessel for memory.
Yet while advertising can suggest an inheritance, only time can create one.
Who Inherits the Story?
There’s another reason the campaign feels particularly timely. Ferragamo approaches its centenary in 2027 at a moment of considerable change, both for the house and for luxury more broadly. Under Artistic Director Maximilian Davis, the brand has been reinterpreting its visual identity for a new generation, balancing the elegance of its archive with a sharper, more contemporary sensibility. It’s a delicate exercise for any heritage house.
The very qualities that make an established luxury brand desirable—its history, craftsmanship and recognisable aesthetic codes— can also become constraints. Too much reverence for the past risks irrelevance; too much reinvention can leave consumers wondering what made the brand special in the first place. Ferragamo’s recent commercial performance underscores the difficulty of that balance. Despite the attention surrounding Davis’s creative direction, the house has faced declining sales, illustrating that critical acclaim and renewed cultural visibility do not automatically translate into commercial momentum.
This makes the emphasis on continuity particularly interesting. In the campaign, family is not presented as a fixed institution but as something expansive and evolving. Alongside parents and children are siblings, friends, musicians and creative collaborators. Some relationships are inherited; others are formed through shared experience and affection.
The same might be said of a family business. A legacy may begin with a founder, but its survival depends on people who were not necessarily present at its creation. Successive generations inherit not only an enterprise, but the responsibility of interpreting what it should become. Davis, who is not a member of the Ferragamo family, is himself part of that process. His role is to bring a new creative perspective to a house whose identity remains closely connected to its founder. It’s a distinction that resonates with the conversations we are exploring at Beyond the Boardroom this month around succession and the transfer of businesses, values and influence between generations. The question is rarely only about who inherits the business. It’s also about who gets to define its future. For a family enterprise, preserving the past and protecting the future are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes continuity requires change.
The Joy of Loving, and Leaving Something Behind
What makes The Joy of Loving compelling is not simply its celebration of family. Holiday advertising has been doing that for generations, it’s the peculiar cultural encounter at its centre: Kris Jenner, the matriarch who helped redefine family as a public enterprise, directing a story for a luxury house whose identity has been shaped by nearly a century of inherited craftsmanship.
One represents the extraordinary commercial possibilities of making family life visible. The other represents the enduring value of a family name. And yet both understand that a legacy is more than something a person leaves behind. It is something others must choose to carry forward. For Ferragamo, that idea finds expression in the objects we keep, the relationships that give them meaning and the possibility that something made today might still matter to someone decades from now.
Perhaps that is the more interesting proposition beneath the holiday sentiment. Inheritance is not simply about what one generation passes on. It is about what the next generation considers worth keeping.
Credits:
Creative Agency: Starkman & Associates
Director: Clara Cullen
Photographer: Ilya Lipkin
Brand Spotlight is BTB’s resident analysis column, spotlighting the campaigns worth paying attention to.