The new La Vie Est Belle campaign (French for Life is beautiful) is a moving ode to life. On a breathtaking remix of Louis Armstrong’s What a wonderful world by French artist SebastiAn, the ambassadresses of the Lancôme family express their true self on a minimalistic background. First with powerful inner joy, then with unleashed joy, Penélope Cruz, Isabella Rossellini, Zendaya, Lily Collins, Amanda Seyfried but also French singer Aya Nakamura and HoYeon, express their femininity with sheer happiness.

We were asked to create a hiatus in the advertising history of La Vie Est Belle (French for Life is beautiful) that had pictured the iconic Julia Roberts for ten years straight as the undisputed ambassadress of the brand. We decided to elevate a fragrance commercial to a brand film that would express the core purpose of Lancôme: happiness can be the most powerful source of beauty.

We came up with the idea to open the La Vie Est Belle universe to all the other ambassadresses of the brand: sincere, powerful women of all generations, linked by music, emotion, and transmission.

We were looking for the greatest hymn of hope and optimism to express happiness. We quickly thought about What a wonderful world, sung by Louis Armstrong in a time when everything in the world seemed to go wrong. War, racism, hatred between human beings.

La vie est belle being the most sold fragrance in the world, the universal theme and lyrics of the song were a no brainer to talk reach everybody. To add a much needed modernity to the brand, but keeping the emotion pristine, we asked French touch producer and musician SebastiAn to create a version that would tell our story: how happiness can lie in deep moments and feelings, but also be expressed in a burst of real communicative joy and laughter. Hence the build up of the song with a breathtaking drop, the choirs and the fragile but powerful voice of French newcomer singer Elah.

After years of pandemic, in the middle of a war in the heart of Europe, with the more necessary than ever BLM movement roaring in the US, gender inequalities striking us with unfairness, social movements in France (home country of Lancôme) were adding a layer of pessimism to the everyday life. In this context, happiness was in fact a very bold claim to make. Singing What a wonderful world was for us a reminder that it’s worth celebrating life and what makes it beautiful.