Tiffany Makes a Holiday Appeal With '90s Nostalgia

A look inside the luxe campaign, which visits adland's fave decade

Luxury advertising has a way of drawing you in through beauty, glamour and incredible product photography. It also comes with a set of codes. Our challenge was to tell a warm, human story while respecting those codes and doing justice to Tiffany & Co.’s jewelry.

We wanted the film to feel unmistakably Tiffany, but also intimate, imperfect and deeply human. We were drawn to the kind of emotional storytelling that made the early John Lewis Holiday ads so moving and built our own story around a child stepping into a parent’s world and discovering who they are beyond being a parent.

Casting was one of our biggest challenges. We were building a family tree across generations, finding people who could believably belong to the same family at different ages.

Ada, who plays Amanda’s daughter, needed to feel like her daughter, but also like someone who could grow into an adult character. We considered aging Amanda up for the 2026 scenes. But we ultimately felt that naturalism was the way to go. Details like matching hairstyles helped create that sense of continuity, while letting each character retain her own identity.

Bringing Derek Cianfrance on was a deliberate choice. In films like Blue Valentine, he has an incredible ability to capture real relationships—and we wanted to bring that same authenticity to our film. He helped us find the balance between a carefully constructed world and natural performances. Rather than asking actors to hit specific emotional beats, he worked with them on intention and gave them room to react in the moment.

None of the cast was given the boards or script in advance. We wanted to leave space for genuine reactions rather than have everyone arrive knowing exactly how a scene was supposed to play.

That approach shaped the entire film. We wanted to build a fully realized version of 1990s New York, with a world that felt cinematic but lived in. Costume designer Erin Benach drew on the nostalgia of films like The Parent Trap and Home Alone 2, while production designer Karen Murphy created a world that felt true to this family, using the Tiffany archive to help bring it to life. Both are longtime collaborators of Derek’s, and that shared history brought a real cohesion to the film.

Some of the archival Tiffany pieces were brought out of storage specifically for the shoot, each with its own security detail and just one authorized handler. It gives you a sense of the care that went into every detail. Our job was to make that carefully constructed world feel completely natural once the characters stepped into it.

Music was another big part of bringing the 1990s to life.

The original Wannadies track had all the nostalgia we wanted, particularly given its association with Romeo and Juliet, but we wanted to make it work for a different kind of love story. Rerecording it lets us keep the spirit of the original while making it softer and more intimate, shifting the focus to the bond between a mother and daughter.

Ultimately, we were bringing two quite different things together: emotional realism and the codes of luxury advertising. It’s not the most obvious combination when you’re working with extraordinary wealth and jewelry that deserves its own close-ups.

But we thought there was something interesting in that tension. Hopefully, we found a way to make the film feel as human as it does beautiful. And if we managed to make you a little weepy along the way, we’ll take that as a good sign.

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