Bloomingdale’s “Happy Together”: Burberry, Baccarat, and the Return of Holiday Belonging

Holiday 2025: Burberry, Baccarat, Canada Goose, and Bloomingdale’s in full spectacle.

COACH

Luxury retail is no longer just about selling product. It’s about engineering atmosphere — the feeling of being invited into a world that most people only see through glass. Bloomingdale’s Holiday 2025 campaign, “Happy Together,” is the latest proof that legacy department stores are rewriting their purpose: not as stores, but as cultural stages. 

This season, Bloomingdale’s isn’t just decorating windows and rolling out gifting tables. It’s staging a full winter mythology built on connection, ritual, and intimacy — and it’s borrowing the language of fashion houses, fine dining, nightlife, and philanthropy to do it. The partnership at the center of it: Bloomingdale’s x Burberry, a 360° collaboration that wraps the flagship in British heritage and performs luxury as warmth, not distance. 

This is what Prophecy Brand pays attention to: who is actually shaping desire in real time, and how.

Burberry doesn’t just “collab” — it takes over the building

At the core of “Happy Together” is a full Burberry takeover of Bloomingdale’s 59th Street flagship in New York. Burberry isn’t being given a rack. It’s being given the façade. The exterior of the building will be wrapped in a giant Burberry scarf — essentially turning one of Manhattan’s most photographed department stores into a Burberry-scale holiday installation. 

That matters.

In luxury storytelling, architecture is status. Putting a Burberry scarf on the entire building is Burberry saying: we’re not a guest here, we’re the mood of December.

MIUMIU

Inside, that same takeover extends into The Carousel @ Bloomingdale’s, the brand’s revolving discovery pop-up concept. For Holiday 2025, The Carousel is being handed to Burberry and merchandised across categories — women’s, men’s, kids’, home — with dedicated capsules and gifting edits. The promise is curation, not chaos: tailored outerwear, signature accessories, and “elevated holiday essentials” that frame Burberry less as a coat you buy and more as a tradition you participate in. 

This is luxury retail’s current playbook:

• Control the visual language of the space.

• Control the mood.

• Control the memory of the night.

That’s Prominence. That’s Act I: Revelation.

Windows, music, performance: retail as red carpet moment

Bloomingdale’s is treating its holiday windows like a premiere, not a display. The flagship windows and full façade are being designed in collaboration with Burberry — “steeped in tradition, wrapped in warmth,” which is very on-message for both houses, and very intentional.

MIUMIU

To launch those windows, they’re not calling a store manager to cut a ribbon. They’re staging a performance.

Bloomingdale’s will unveil its 2025 Holiday Windows with a live set by RAYE, the GRAMMY-nominated, BRIT Award–winning artist. The window reveal becomes a night: fashion, live music, press, VIPs, spectacle. The visual narrative of the store (Burberry scarf, Burberry windows) becomes the backdrop for content and coverage. That’s how legacy retailers now buy culture relevance in Q4 without showing a runway. 

From a publicity standpoint, this is smart:

• It drives immediate earned media around Bloomingdale’s Holiday 2025 campaign.

• It links Burberry to New York nightlife energy, not just British heritage.

• It tells the customer: “You weren’t just shopping. You were there.”

Immersive spaces as status — Baccarat, Canada Goose, Alice + Olivia

Beyond Burberry, Bloomingdale’s is layering micro-worlds inside the store. This is important because it shows where department store strategy is moving in 2025: hospitality, personalization, and souvenir-level memory.

Here’s how they’re doing it:

Studio 59 by Baccarat

Bloomingdale’s is transforming its iconic in-store café into a Paris-inspired Baccarat environment. Baccarat lighting, Baccarat table culture, Baccarat ritual. The message is: sit, stay, be seen, feel expensive. There’s also a neighboring Baccarat gifting boutique with personalization for the season — which turns gifting into ceremony, not transaction. 

Alice + Olivia x 40 Carrots

This is fashion invading the café in a playful, branded way — style and sugar living in the same space. It keeps the act of “grabbing a bite” inside Bloomingdale’s on-brand, photographable, and shareable. 

Canada Goose Holiday Pop-Up

Canada Goose is being positioned not just as outerwear, but as a heritage object. The pop-up presents archive pieces, craftsmanship storytelling, and a workshop where guests can get a complimentary personalized keepsake made from remixed materials. That’s customization, repair culture, and sustainability signaling — all in one activation. 

There’s also complimentary garment bag customization on weekends. That detail matters. Personalization is now part of perceived luxury value. When you walk out of Bloomingdale’s with something literally marked as yours, that’s Elevation.

This is Act II: Resonance.

It’s not just “do you like us?”

It’s “did we change how you feel about yourself while you were here?”

Holiday retail is now family, not just spend

One of the most effective emotional levers in “Happy Together” is its softness. This is not the icy, untouchable luxury Christmas of the past. It’s deliberately intimate and sentimental.

Example: Santaland: Happy Together.

Instead of a cold, high-gloss Santa line built for mall throughput, Bloomingdale’s is framing a “whimsical family adventure” with Burberry bears and interactive moments. That’s legacy-building. You’re raising the next generation of Bloomingdale’s loyalists by giving them memory, comfort, story, and “we go here every year” ritual. 

There’s also an activation literally called “Gift Yourself,” presented with the Bloomingdale’s American Express Card. The positioning choice is interesting: self-gifting reframed as self-celebration, not indulgence. That’s very aligned with modern luxury psychology (reward, not guilt). 

BURBERRY

Philanthropy as brand language

Legacy retail can’t just talk about wonder. It has to talk about care.

Bloomingdale’s is tying the campaign to two philanthropic partnerships across November and December:

• No Kid Hungry (Nov 1–30): Guests can round up their in-store purchases or donate at checkout to support the nonprofit’s work to end childhood hunger in the U.S. Bloomingdale’s is also programming live cooking demos from partner chefs to drive awareness and fundraising. 

• Child Mind Institute (Dec 1–31): Bloomingdale’s will continue its multi-year relationship with Child Mind Institute, raising money for youth mental health and learning support. Shoppers can donate at checkout, and proceeds from the limited-edition holiday bears (dressed in Burberry) will benefit the organization. 

This is Act III: Legacy.

It says: our holiday campaign doesn’t just exist to move product in Q4 — it leaves an imprint and names what we stand for.

From a brand strategy perspective, this does three things at once:

1. It protects Bloomingdale’s from being read as “just selling British check nostalgia.”

2. It strengthens the “togetherness” claim in a way that’s culturally safe and emotionally credible.

3. It associates Burberry with generosity and care, not just status.

Why this matters (and why we’re covering it)

We track moments like this because they’re blueprints for how luxury retail, fashion houses, and culture brands will behave for the next 12–18 months.

BURBERRY

What Bloomingdale’s and Burberry are doing here is extremely current luxury strategy:

• Take over physical space so the brand becomes the environment, not the guest.

• Design memory loops (window unveil with a major artist performance, heritage bears as collectibles, customized keepsakes from remixed materials) so people talk about the experience instead of just listing what they bought.

• Name the values out loud (craftsmanship, connection, giving back, family ritual) so the campaign isn’t just aesthetic — it’s morally positioned.

This is what we mean when we talk about Prominence, Amplification, Elevation, Exposure.

Prominence: Burberry wrapping a New York flagship in its own language.

Amplification: Holiday nostalgia reframed as a luxury feeling you can physically enter.

Elevation: Baccarat cafés, Canada Goose workshop, curated capsules — intimacy as privilege.

Exposure: Philanthropy, content, digital takeover, out-of-home, and a performance moment that exists to be photographed and shared. 

This is holiday retail in 2025.

This is cultural work.

This is the business model now.