Bottega Veneta Explores the Surreal with Jacob Elordi and Duane Michals

Bottega Veneta has always operated in a space between craftsmanship and concept — grounded in reality, but never afraid to step into abstraction. Its latest project, What Are Dreams, continues that dialogue, pairing one of Hollywood’s most magnetic figures, Jacob Elordi, with the legendary photographer and filmmaker Duane Michals for a short film and accompanying photo series.

Shot in black and white at Michals’ New York home, the collaboration is as much about conversation as creation — a meeting between two generations of artists exploring the blurred line between the seen and the imagined. Elordi becomes a vessel through which Michals revisits his lifelong fascination with Surrealism, performance, and the subconscious.

Across twelve striking images, Elordi appears in a sequence of mysterious, theatrical settings — a billowing curtain, a convex mirror, a suspended feather — each an echo of Michals’ visual language that first emerged in the 1960s. These moments don’t demand interpretation so much as they invite reflection, recalling the dreamlike worlds of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte. There’s a deliberate tension between stillness and movement, the real and the surreal, that feels distinctly Bottega Veneta — precise yet deeply human.

The film component sees Elordi reciting Michals’ poem What Are Dreams, originally published in the artist’s 2001 book Questions Without Answers. The poem captures what Michals calls “the midnight movies of the mind,” where familiarity becomes uncanny, and imagination distorts the everyday. His handwritten verses even appear across some of the photographs, merging image and text in a way that makes the visual experience feel more like a stream of thought than a static composition.

For Michals, now in his nineties, the collaboration is an extension of his lifelong mission: “I’m very much interested in the realm of the invisible. My problem is how do I make the invisible visible?” he says. Elordi, in turn, steps into this dreamscape with quiet confidence — not as a celebrity subject, but as a creative partner.

It’s a fitting project for Bottega Veneta, a house that has long placed artistry at the core of its identity. By bringing together a visionary photographer and one of fashion’s most compelling new faces, What Are Dreams becomes less a campaign and more an exploration of imagination itself — where the boundary between film, poetry, and fashion dissolves into something beautifully uncertain.