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Miu Miu The Encounter Welcomes the Year of the Snake
Miu Miu's "The Encounter" is the brand's Chinese New Year 2025 campaign, a short film set inside Yi Lau Yi, a Cantonese tea house in Beijing, directed by Shujun Wei and starring brand ambassadors Liu Haocun and Zhao Jinmai in a dreamlike narrative paying homage to the Year of the Snake.
Published in January 2025 and originating from Italy as part of Miu Miu's global creative output, the campaign arrives at a moment when luxury fashion houses are deepening their engagement with Lunar New Year as a cultural and commercial event rather than a promotional footnote. The film unfolds across an exclusive collection that includes jewel-encrusted denim, preppy tweeds, crochet-knit serpent charms, lucky red apparel, signature Miu Miu sneakers, and personalised Chinese knots — each piece calibrated to reflect both the house's irreverent elegance and the symbolic vocabulary of the Snake year, according to miumiu.com.
Miu Miu, founded by Miuccia Prada in 1993 as part of Prada Group, according to Wikipedia, has built a reputation for positioning youthful intellectualism against the conventions of luxury fashion. In the United States and across European markets, the brand is frequently discussed alongside Prada and Bottega Veneta as a house that commands critical attention beyond seasonal runway cycles. "The Encounter" extends that positioning into Chinese cultural territory, presenting the Lunar New Year not as a licensing opportunity but as a narrative event worthy of cinematic production. The campaign was released across digital platforms, with Hypebeast covering the film on January 7, 2025, and the brand simultaneously activating physical experiences in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou to give the film a living counterpart in the markets it most directly addresses. Clapboard Score: 74/100.
Miu Miu targets a Chinese consumer base that has made Lunar New Year campaigns a competitive battleground for global luxury fashion houses. The brand's approach with "The Encounter" reflects a clear strategic insight: cultural authenticity, delivered through cinematic production values and genuine talent investment, creates a more durable brand impression than seasonal product showcasing alone.
The global luxury apparel market presents a complex operating environment. According to Bain and Altagamma, the luxury apparel segment registered roughly flat growth in 2025, oscillating between a one-percent decline and one-percent growth — a context that makes campaign differentiation commercially significant rather than merely reputationally desirable. According to Grand View Research, Asia-Pacific represented approximately 38.4 percent of global luxury clothing revenue in 2025, underscoring why Italian luxury houses continue to invest heavily in culturally specific activations directed at Chinese audiences. In the United States and across Western European markets, including Italy, the appetite for campaigns that demonstrate cross-cultural fluency has also grown among diaspora communities and younger luxury consumers who follow Chinese pop culture closely.
Miu Miu's direct competitors in the Chinese New Year luxury campaign space include Gucci and Louis Vuitton, both of which produce annual Lunar New Year films and capsule collections with comparable production ambition. What distinguishes Miu Miu's approach in "The Encounter" is its choice of a Beijing-based filmmaker in Shujun Wei and its casting of Liu Haocun and Zhao Jinmai — two Chinese actresses with deep cultural credibility — rather than global celebrities with diluted regional specificity. The activation calendar reinforces the strategy: a Shanghai event at Raccoon Records on January 10 through 12, a Beijing ice-skating takeover at Shichahai Rink from January 15 through 19, and a Guangzhou gathering at Liwan Park from January 16 through 19 demonstrate a brand treating China as a living geography rather than a target demographic, as documented on miumiu.com.
Shujun Wei directed "The Encounter" for Miu Miu's Chinese New Year 2025 campaign. Wei, a screenwriter and filmmaker based in Beijing, brings an interior sensibility to the film — one rooted in the texture of everyday Chinese social life rather than the spectacular orientalism that can flatten cultural campaigns produced by outside directors.
The setting of Yi Lau Yi, a Cantonese tea house, functions as more than décor. It operates as a symbolic architecture: a space where generations meet, where ritual and modernity coexist, and where the snake — an animal associated in Chinese tradition with wisdom, intuition, and transformation — can move through a dreamlike narrative logic without feeling forced. The film's visual grammar draws on this atmosphere, placing Liu Haocun and Zhao Jinmai within a world that feels simultaneously familiar and heightened, according to coverage published by Hypebeast and designscene.net.
Photographer Jack Webb captured the campaign's still imagery, while Edward Quarmby provided creative direction and Lotta Volkova handled styling — a production team that brings together international craft expertise in service of a distinctly Chinese narrative frame. Volkova's styling choices amplify the collection's dual identity: the jewel-encrusted denim and preppy tweeds read as unmistakably Miu Miu in silhouette and attitude, while the crochet-knit serpent charms, personalised Chinese knots, and lucky red pieces signal genuine engagement with the Year of the Snake's symbolic register rather than surface-level decoration. As reported by savoirflair.com, the campaign positions these objects as wearable talismans — items that carry cultural meaning alongside their fashion function. The result is a film that earns its cultural context rather than borrowing it, a distinction that defines the difference between a campaign and a moment.
"The Encounter" accumulated measurable digital engagement following its January 2025 release. Archive data indicates the campaign film recorded 13,035 views on YouTube alongside 288 likes and 24 comments, while a LinkedIn post connected to the campaign received 13 comments, as documented in Clapboard's campaign archive. These figures reflect a film distributed primarily through brand-owned channels and luxury-specialist media rather than mass-reach platforms, a pattern consistent with Miu Miu's selective media posture.
No performance coverage of "The Encounter" has been identified from Campaign magazine, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious, which positions the campaign within a tier of culturally significant brand work that generates specialist and community-level engagement rather than mainstream advertising industry recognition. Hypebeast published its overview on January 7, 2025, and designscene.net provided additional coverage, both treating the film as a noteworthy cultural event within luxury fashion rather than an advertising execution — a framing that reflects the campaign's own self-presentation.
Structurally, "The Encounter" demonstrates strong alignment between creative ambition and brand identity. The decision to anchor the campaign in physical activations across Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou — documented on miumiu.com — means that digital view counts do not capture the full scope of audience contact. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100 reflects a production that succeeds on craft and cultural coherence while operating within a media footprint calibrated for depth over reach. For a house like Miu Miu, whose brand equity depends on a sense of insider access and cultural seriousness, that calibration is itself a strategic choice rather than a limitation.
"The Encounter" is Miu Miu's Chinese New Year 2025 campaign celebrating the Year of the Snake. Directed by Beijing-based filmmaker Shujun Wei, the film is set inside Yi Lau Yi, a Cantonese tea house, and stars brand ambassadors Liu Haocun and Zhao Jinmai in a dreamlike narrative alongside an exclusive festive collection, as documented on miumiu.com.
Shujun Wei directed "The Encounter" for Miu Miu. Wei is a screenwriter and filmmaker based in Beijing whose interior, culturally grounded sensibility shaped the film's dreamlike atmosphere. Creative direction was provided by Edward Quarmby, styling by Lotta Volkova, and still photography by Jack Webb, according to campaign credits.
Liu Haocun and Zhao Jinmai appear in "The Encounter." Both are Chinese actresses and Miu Miu brand ambassadors, as confirmed by miumiu.com and reported by Hypebeast on January 7, 2025. Their casting reflects the brand's commitment to cultural credibility within Chinese New Year campaigns rather than reliance on globally recognised crossover talent.
"The Encounter" showcases jewel-encrusted denim, preppy tweeds, crochet-knit serpent charms, lucky red apparel, signature Miu Miu sneakers, and personalised Chinese knots, according to miumiu.com. Each piece balances the house's signature irreverent elegance with the symbolic vocabulary of the Year of the Snake, functioning as both fashion and cultural talisman.
Miu Miu staged three activations in China alongside "The Encounter" film. A Shanghai event at Raccoon Records ran January 10 through 12, a Beijing ice-skating takeover at Shichahai Rink ran January 15 through 19, and a Guangzhou gathering at Liwan Park ran January 16 through 19, all documented on miumiu.com.
"The Encounter" received a Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100. The score reflects strong craft and cultural coherence in the campaign's filmmaking, casting, and collection alignment. Coverage appeared on Hypebeast and designscene.net, though no recognition from major advertising trade publications has been identified for this campaign.
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