Dom Pérignon calls on celebrities to share journey of ‘creation,’ but will it work?

While there’s an obvious moral tale here, the incident also teaches us something about the power of celebrity, which is not lost on LVMH, (also the owner of Dom Pérignon).

The brand has just launched a simple photographic campaign, ‘Creation,’ capturing celebrity portraits: from the acting world, Zoë Kravitz and Tilda Swinton; musicians Iggy Pop and Anderson Paak; chef Clare Smyth; dancer Alexander Ekman; and artist Takashi Murakami. The series has been shot by Collier Schorr.

It’s a rather deliberate play at associating the brand with the breadth of the creative world. Each of them offers what they feel is a pithy quote to caption their photo. For Paak, “Creation is never over, is never done,” and for Swinton, “Creation is a leap of faith.”

The celebrities wear black and are each clutching a bottle of 2015 Vintage Dom Pérignon. There’s really not much more to it, unless you’re Dom Pérignon, in which case the campaign is “an eternal journey – one that unfolds like a spiral, transcending time and space, creating resonances between the past, present and future.”

To put that in plainer terms, the brand is all about scarcity, exclusivity and prestige but it also likes to reflect on the nature of vintage. The bottles being swung around in the photo shoot are from 2015, for example, and so the nature of time is hammed up.

Conceived by BETC Etoile Rouge, it coincides with the introduction of four new vintages and, beyond the photoshoot, there is a lot more planned. A rather secretive immersive exhibition will appear somewhere in London on May 16, which, in fairness to Dom Perignon, is what all the talk of ‘spirals’ and ‘time’ directly relates to. It will be a physical evocation of past, present and future starring the seven creators using mixed media expressions including photography, film and text. Similarly, next year, one of the creators will be giving some sort of live performance as part of a further immersive experience.

Dom Pérignon’s 20th-century history is fizzing with celebrity endorsement. Photographer Bert Stern’s 1960s Marilyn Monroe photoshoot, for example, was awash with Dom Pérignon because he bought her a case of it.

And it’s probably worth noting that photography itself has a particularly strong relationship with the brand. The bottle became the celebrity in 1974 when photographer Robert Mapplethorpe shot it on Polaroid. It was titled Cuvée Dom Perignon (a New Year’s Card). He later used the bottle’s form again in a champagne triptych.

In this century, Dom Pérignon has collaborated with – or with the estates of, in some cases – Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Karl Lagerfeld, Jeff Koons, David Lynch and Lenny Kravitz. (Thank god it never worked with Orson Welles!)

And so it goes on. The Lady Gaga collaboration with Dom Perignon, which started in 2021, has seen highly produced ads coupled with bespoke packaging.

This potted history is useful context when considering that the new campaign, simple as it is, builds on what has gone before it. And even if you don’t find it terribly inspiring, throwing a whole host of celebrities at the campaign is likely to work, as it’s had such an effervescent effect on the category in the past.