Magic Man

Creative director Grant Dudson conjures dreams for the one percent. His AI-enabled, experiential designs are changing the game.

By Horacio Silva 15/12/2023

Among Grant Dudson’s fondest memories of growing up in northern England are his visits to a children’s fair. “It was nothing special on the surface,” he recalls. “A few random donkeys and farm animals, but to me it contained a magic world.” What made it especially enchanting were tiny multi-storey houses, designed for children, with small doors to crawl through and a labyrinth of rooms to explore. “It was a world of discovery once you were inside, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten.” Not only that, but adults who entered the space to look for their children also seemed to be transported. “There was a real sense of enjoyment there, not their usual faces,” he says. “I noticed and thought, There’s something interesting in that.”

Louise Gluck, the late American poet who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, famously wrote: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” Dudson, now 43, has worked out how to turn that insight into a business for adults.

*A multi-sensory Johnnie Walker Blue tasting experience at the Mandala Club in Singapore*

As Creative Director of the London agency Chorus, in the last five years he has created exhilarating experiences for brands like Tiffany & Co, Talisker, Tudor, Coach and the city of Abu Dhabi. For Johnny Walker Blue, for example, he created a 360-degree immersive installation complete with a fragrance redolent of the whisky’s flavour profile. “By stimulating the olfactory sense, it connects to the drinking experience in a more intense manner,” he says. He is also somewhat of a digital ninja, slicing his way through social media, and generating the types of engagement that most can only dream about. His artful AI-generated renderings for the world’s top luxury brands ask questions like, What if Tiffany & Co. were to take over the Maldives? (An image of this project, which has garnered more than 3 million views and almost 40,000 likes on LinkedIn alone, appears on the cover of this issue.)

But ask him what he does, and he’ll reply: “It’s not a black and white answer. I usually tell people that I am an experiential artist and a creative director.” In addition to his sideline as a fine artist, he has also been a karate expert, model (for Hugo Boss and Vivienne Westwood, among others) and would-be pop singer. “I used to be in a band,” he says of spending his early twenties in the regrettably named Tiida. “We got called all sorts of things. I still write and release music because I think that’s it’s important as a creative to always have something on the side that fuels your passion for life.”

*For a Tiffany & Co concept Dudson envisaged an entire takeover of the Maldives that went viral online*

“I think the entertainment side of me has always provided a lens through which to view my creative work,” continues Dudson, who now lives in the Victorian coastal resort town of Hove with his wife of six years and is wearing a multi-coloured Ralph Lauren Navajo-print jumper, surrounded by the colourful, curated miscellany of his living room. “I always ask myself, What can I do to entertain an audience? I’m not interested in creating anything that results in my audience being indifferent or apathetic.”

His sometimes-Surreal efforts resonate at a time when marketing luxury goods through premium experiences has never been more important. Prestige brands are scrambling to lure one percenters into their figurative and literal stores by creating immersive, escapist fantasies that money can’t buy. The international luxury circuit has started to resemble a very exclusive version of that northern-English children’s fair, with profligate parties in the world’s most far-flung places, and brands vying to outspend one another.

The fact that many luxury consumers now commodify themselves on social media—and need to broadcast their VIP experiences until their friends and followers are Tiffany-blue with envy—probably doesn’t hurt, either. These trends are playing out in corporate culture, too, as immersive strategies and other fun stunts are employed to boost morale in the workplace. Courvoisier, for example recently hired an “Ambassador of Joy.” And the idea of motivating audiences (be they customers or employees) by creating whole worlds, not just spaces, has become the new orthodoxy.

“It’s the way everything is going,” Dudson says. “Virgil Abloh” — the late menswear designer at Louis Vuitton — “got that customers want to be transported to new places, with new things to explore not just to so-called immersive experiences where your imagination is meant to do most of the work. Unfortunately, a lot of brand efforts fall short.”

*A rendering of a concept for Abu Dhabi of striking amorphous and geometric sculptures known as the Reflection Realm.*

That’s why Dudson continues to “grow-down but not infantalise” his work offerings. To create that sense of joy and wonder that has emerged as a holy grail for brands, he will continue to work with AI, a technology that he initially opposed but now allows him to treat every facet of an environment as a canvas.

Louise Gluck had a phrase for this, too. She called it: “Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving.” Dudson sees it not only as high art, but also good business.

“AI has created a whole new world of expression for creatives to go, What if?,” he says. “For brands, it provides an affordable way to test out new concepts before spending millions and then finding that it’s a disaster.”

According to Dudson, luxury purveyors which ignore the sense of magic we feel as children, when we are freest to question and explore our identities, do so at their own peril. “There’s a paradigm shift now, especially with Gen Z,” he explains, “where people want to remain children for as long as possible. That doesn’t mean rejecting adulthood wholesale. It’s important to take responsibility, but also go and jump on a bouncy castle for an hour, if that’s what you want to do.”

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