Bottega Veneta unveils its latest artistic endeavor, What Are Dreams, a hauntingly beautiful fashion film and photo series by acclaimed photographer Duane Michals featuring actor Jacob Elordi. The new Bottega Veneta campaign merges art, poetry, and surrealism, capturing the brand’s quiet luxury through a lens of imagination and introspection.
A fashion film that dreams in black and white
Shot in Michals’ New York home, the fashion film revisits the artist’s signature visual language — a fusion of dreamlike storytelling and emotional intimacy. Presented entirely in black and white, the project delves into the unconscious and the uncanny, placing Elordi within mysterious, surreal tableaux: a billowing curtain, a suspended feather, a convex mirror. Each frame feels like a fleeting thought caught between memory and illusion.
The accompanying short film features Elordi reading Michals’ poem What Are Dreams, first published in 2001 in Questions Without Answers. His voice becomes the narrative thread connecting image and text, while handwritten lines from the poem echo across the photographs — a reminder that language, like fashion, can reveal the unseen.
This Bottega Veneta campaign reflects the house’s ongoing commitment to creative collaboration. It unites two artists from different generations — Michals, a pioneer of conceptual photography, and Elordi, a rising actor and brand ambassador since 2024. The collaboration also reconnects the photographer to the maison’s history; Michals previously shot a Bottega Veneta campaign in 1985.
BOTTEGA VENETA: What Are Dreams
JACOB ELORDI, photographed by DUANE MICHALS
