There is something almost perverse about staging a luxury event on a train in 2026. Private jets exist. So do helicopters, superyachts, and first-class cabins with lie-flat beds and noise-canceling headphones. And yet on Saturday night, a group of extremely famous people—Tom Ford, Roger Federer, Stella McCartney, among others—boarded the Belmond British Pullman at London's Victoria Station to celebrate the maiden voyage of a single restored carriage named Celia.
The hosts were Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, the director-designer couple whose visual maximalism has defined films from Moulin Rouge! to Elvis. The Celia carriage, which Martin designed in collaboration with Belmond, is an exercise in Art Deco revival: marquetry panels, hand-embroidered silk lampshades, and the kind of brass detailing that requires someone to polish it. It is named after Celia Johnson, the British actress whose restrained heartbreak in Brief Encounter (1945) made train stations synonymous with romantic longing. The reference is deliberate. So is the extravagance.
The anti-minimalism moment
Martin's interiors arrive at a curious cultural inflection point. After a decade of Scandinavian restraint and tech-bro austerity—white walls, invisible seams, the fetishization of "clean"—there is a visible hunger for ornament. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express has waiting lists. Ralph Lauren's latest campaign featured wood-paneled libraries. Even Apple, the church of less-is-more, has started putting texture back into its product photography. The Celia carriage, with its jewel tones and deliberate opulence, is less a throwback than a thesis: that luxury, at its most persuasive, requires craft you can see and touch.
Why trains, why now
The guest list—Ford, Federer, McCartney—was not accidental. These are figures whose personal brands depend on a certain idea of timelessness, of quality that outlasts trend cycles. A train journey, unlike a flight, cannot be optimized. It is slow by design. It demands that you sit, look out the window, and surrender to the passage of landscape. For a cohort exhausted by efficiency culture, that surrender is starting to look like the ultimate status symbol. Belmond, owned by LVMH since 2019, has been quietly betting on this shift, investing in its rail and river offerings as experiential luxury outpaces goods.
The Luhrmann-Martin brand
For Luhrmann and Martin, the carriage is also a canny extension of their creative empire beyond film. Martin's four Academy Awards for production and costume design have made her one of the most sought-after visual minds in Hollywood, but the couple has long been interested in immersive environments—their Great Gatsby collaboration with Tiffany, the Elvis exhibition at Graceland. A train carriage is, in a sense, a set that moves. It is also a product that can be experienced repeatedly, monetized indefinitely, and photographed endlessly by guests who become unpaid ambassadors. The Celia will run on various Belmond routes, meaning its influence will ripple far beyond one London evening.
Our take
There is a risk, always, that this kind of revivalism tips into costume party—rich people playing dress-up in someone else's nostalgia. But Martin's work has never been mere pastiche; it is too rigorous, too obsessive in its research. The Celia carriage feels less like an escape from the present than a challenge to it: a reminder that beauty can be labor-intensive, that slowness can be a choice, and that the most radical thing a luxury brand can do in 2026 is ask you to put your phone down and watch the countryside go by.
