There’s something irresistibly human about dreams. The way they blur logic, rewrite memory, and stitch together moments that make no sense yet feel entirely true. In dreams, time folds, gravity bends, and emotions run wild. They are fragments of our subconscious sewn together by imagination, an unfinished film playing in the quiet cinema of the mind. It is precisely this poetic tension between illusion and reality that Bottega Veneta captures in its new campaign What Are Dreams, a collaboration between legendary photographer Duane Michals and brand ambassador Jacob Elordi.
Shot in black and white at Michals’ New York home, the campaign feels intimate yet otherworldly, like stepping into someone else’s subconscious. The project spans twelve photographs and a short film, blurring the line between art and fashion, between the visible and the imagined.
Michals, whose surrealist visual storytelling has influenced photography since the 1960s, places Elordi in a series of curious scenes. A billowing curtain that seems alive. A convex mirror distorting perception. A feather floating midair. Each frame hums with quiet mystery. The props echo the surrealist artists Michals has long admired, including Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte. It is an invitation to see the world differently.
In the accompanying short film, Elordi reads Michals’ 2001 poem What Are Dreams, a haunting reflection on “the midnight movies of the mind… where things look familiar, but not at all the same.” His voice brings warmth to the surreal imagery and turns the visual experience into something inward and human. The performance feels less like acting and more like drifting, as if he were inhabiting a dream rather than performing one.
Elordi’s casting feels perfectly intentional. He is an actor who moves between fantasy and truth. Under Michals’ lens, he becomes something else entirely. Not a celebrity, not a character, but a dreamer caught between knowing and unknowing.
This is not the first time Bottega Veneta has worked with Michals. Nearly forty years ago, he photographed one of the brand’s campaigns in 1985. The reunion speaks to the quiet continuity at the heart of Bottega’s creative vision under Louise Trotter. The house’s strength lies in its ability to reimagine luxury as something deeply human, more about form and feeling than spectacle.
The campaign, What Are Dreams is not about sleep or fantasy. It is about perception. About noticing what hides in plain sight. About finding beauty in the blur. The campaign reminds us that dreams are not escapes from reality but reflections of it, warped just enough to reveal something true.
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