Qixi 2026: six Kering Houses, one enduring legend
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August 19, 2026
Qixi 2026: six Kering Houses, one enduring legend
On a late summer's night, look up and there they are, burning against the darkness – visible even to the naked eye: Vega, brilliant above the western edge of the Milky Way, and Altair, shining in the east. For more than two millennia, Chinese tradition has seen them as Zhinü and Niulang, lovers fated to remain apart, reunited for a single night each year during the festival of Qixi. This year, six Kering Houses revisit this enduring legend, each offering its own interpretation of a love story written in the stars.
First recorded in the Classic of Poetry, the oldest surviving collection of Chinese verse, the story of Qixi tells of the immortal weaver girl Zhinü, who married the mortal cowherd Niulang. Together they built a life between heaven and earth until the celestial order intervened, separating them across the Milky Way. Only once each year—on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month—do magpies form a bridge across the Silver River, allowing the lovers to reunite before the birds disperse and the distance returns.
For centuries, the Qixi festival was associated with traditional ideals of femininity. Women prayed to Zhinü, whose celestial weaving was said to create the clouds themselves, seeking wisdom, dexterity, and excellence in needlework – and, alongside it, happiness in marriage.
But Zhinü is not merely an emblem of idealized virtue; she freely—radically—embraces a love that defies the celestial order, and accepts the terms of its annual return because the alternative is never to meet at all. Viewed through a contemporary lens, Qixi becomes a story of distance and reunion, choice and consequence, endurance and hope. And love, in this legend, becomes an act of courage.
A living cultural text
This openness to reinterpretation explains much of the festival’s enduring vitality. One of the defining moments in China's cultural calendar, Qixi has also evolved into the country's most important gifting occasion after Chinese New Year – a role comparable to Valentine's Day in the West.
Since the mid-2010s, luxury brands have increasingly embraced it as an opportunity to engage with Chinese culture through storytelling. By decade’s end, Qixi was a fixture of the global luxury marketing calendar, with campaigns today launching in mid-July—weeks before the August celebration—and growing steadily more ambitious in scale and imagination.
The most compelling of these enter into conversation with the legend, honoring it while finding fresh meaning in its motifs. And while they encompass romance, the best of them also make space for friendship, self-expression, chosen intimacy and emotional independence – speaking to a generation of Chinese consumers for whom love means something more complex than the promise of marriage.
Six Houses, six voices
It is this cultural richness and complexity that draws Kering to Qixi. Across fashion and jewelry, six of its Houses—Gucci, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta and Saint Laurent; Qeelin and Boucheron—approach the same legend from six unique angles.
The moments and the words that make a love story
Through its 2026 campaign, Gucci celebrates love as something unpredictable and joyfully larger than life, taking its cue from China’s micro-drama. For the Love of Drama unfolds across three episodes, embracing the genre’s irony, plot twists, and heightened emotion: a seemingly-chance encounter at a train platform, a reunion in the rain, and school gathering where the heroine arrives transformed, Horsebit earrings catching the light and the Jetset GG Marmont bag swinging from her arm.
Through Anthony Vaccarello's “Love Letters, Love Matters”, Saint Laurent strips away spectacle. Love letters by martial artist and screen legend Bruce Lee, sociologist Li Yinhe, and poet Xu Peifen—fragments of longing, devotion, and desire—are brought to life in films directed by Jeremy Z. Qin. Alongside the films, still photography by No. 223 (Lin Zhipeng) feature a selection of China-exclusive creations, including a new gold-tone charm combining the House’s dove motif, Cassandre logo, and the numeral seven, a discreet reference to the Cowherd and Weaver Girl and the love that endures across distance. In parallel, an exhibition by No. 223 (Lin Zhipeng) presenting a different series of photographs is on view at Saint Laurent Rive Droite Sanlitun in Beijing since August 6.
Bottega Veneta, too, explores the space between departure and return, its campaign—"A Thread of Love"—following two protagonists whose paths intertwine, diverge, and, like those of Zhinü and Niulang, ultimately lead them back to one another. Accompanied by an original poem that evokes starlight spun into a yarn of eternal devotion, the campaign’s shifting light, unexpected angles, and intimate close-ups reveal the meticulous detailing of the Fall 2026 collection, whose craftsmanship echoes the campaign's central metaphor: individual threads irrevocably woven together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The narrative continues beyond the campaign through Chinese artist Xue Zheng's public installation, where textile-inspired forms transform materiality into a meditation on the bonds that connect us.
Real-life couple Luo Wei and Li Ling lend Balenciaga’s campaign a sense of genuine affection, as the House explores the sweet, authentic language of first love. A capsule of washed black and white ready-to-wear carries handwritten declarations—"I ❤ U" and "I ❤ U 2"—while a special-edition black suede Le City Moto Bag is decorated with ribbons and arrow-pierced hearts reminiscent of doodles in a school notebook – or playfully drawn on a crush.
Where fate becomes choice
Boucheron reframes Qixi as a celebration of self-love and inner emotional resonance, with its iconic Plume de Paon transformed into a powerful emblem of self-fulfillment. For its 2026 Chinese Valentine’s Day campaign Fly High, a Life of Fulfillment, Global Brand Ambassador Zhou Dongyu glides on an urban rooftop amid wind and open sky, adorned with layered Plume de Paon creations whose refined openwork captures the feather’s natural grace and weightless lightness. As a peacock feather slips from her hand and rises skyward, the reimagined Qixi narrative invites everyone to embrace their true selves and pursue a life of personal fulfillment.
Qeelin, for its part, evokes both Qixi’s hopes for blessings and the lovers at its heart, introducing purple jadeite into its iconic Wulu collection for the first time. Each piece—set in 18K rose gold and framed with diamonds—in this color long associated with auspiciousness is recast as a contemporary talisman, carrying fortune and confidence. The stone itself, with its fine translucency and distinctive “smoky watercolor” finish, embodies Qeelin's collectible artistry and craftsmanship.
Beyond the night
From cinematic to intimate, playful to talismanic, each House finds its own, authentic way into Qixi’s timeless legend while remaining true to its emotional core. Together, the campaigns point to something larger: an ongoing dialogue with Chinese culture as a living creative force.
This dialogue has deepened over time, from Qeelin joining the Group in 2013 to initiatives like Kering CRAFT, developed with Shanghai Fashion Week to support the next generation of Chinese designers, and the Group’s recent partnership with ICICLE under House of Wonders. And what has emerged is a relationship built on interpretation as much as inheritance – heritage read forward.
So, on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month, Vega and Altair will meet across the Milky Way, exactly as they always have. But what that love is asked to mean does not have to be exactly as it has always been.
