GAP Extends Its 'Dress Normal' Holiday Campaign With Help From Sofia Coppola [VIDEOS]

facebook tweet

This year's batch of Gap holiday ads start running on Nov. 3. Gap's new campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy and directed by Sofia Coppola, does not feature your typical traditional holiday commercials. Instead of surprise gifts and choreographed snow-angel sessions, Gap will feature real things that real people do during the holidays, like "going to a bar, getting annoyed by relatives and enduring an off-putting performance by a kid they're apparently related to."

According to Business Week, Coppola's Gap ads are awkward but sweet, just like most people's holidays. The ads are part of Gap's "Dress Normal" campaign, which launched this fall and was supposed to reinvigorate the 45-year-old brand that has come to be associated with forgettable sweaters and middle-class shopping malls. When every other brand seems to be trying to sell an outlook and lifestyle, Gap hoped its "blasé, we-don't-care-who-you-are-we-just-want-to-sell-you-a-nice-jean-jacket" approach to normcore felt different.

"While intended to be provocative and ironic, we believe the fall floor set may be, in a word, too 'normal,'" Janney Capital Markets analyst Adrienne Yih-Tennant wrote in a September note reported by BuzzFeed. Same-store sales were down this past fall and the company had to discount its clothes even more heavily than usual. As it turns out, there's a fine line between "classic" and "boring" in fashion, and "Dress Normal" hasn't yet managed to convince enough people that it's classic.

Coppola has a knack for making the mundane seem touchingly profound, which is exactly what Gap has been going for. If the company runs the ads often enough during the holidays, people might just understand what "Dress Normal" is all about.

Watch some of Gap's "Dress Normal" Holiday 2014 ads below!