Bottega Veneta "What Are Dreams?" : Jacob Elordi by Duane Michals

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ESQUIRESG

 

[Frederic01]

BOTTEGA VENETA

 

[Frederic01]

Photographer Duane Michals Lenses Jacob Elordi for Bottega Veneta’s New Campaign​

The collaboration with the 93-year-old photographer is the fashion brand's latest engagement with the art world.


Jacob Elordi in Bottega Veneta’s “What Are Dreams” campaign, photographed by Duane Michals. Photo courtesy of Bottega Veneta.

Actor Jacob Elordi recently visited Duane Michals’s Gramercy Park living room for a photoshoot. The 93-year-old photographer captured black-and-white stills of Elordi interacting with flowers, a feather, a thicket of tree branches, a distorting mirror, and other props aligned with Michals’s surreal visual language.

The resulting images, along with a short behind-the-scenes film, debut today in “What Are Dreams,” a campaign from Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta, who named Elordi brand ambassador in 2024. In the film, the actor sits in a rocking chair and reads a poem by Michals. “It is our enigmatic fate that we must dream in time and wait,” Elordi says softly, while piano music plays in the background.

The collaboration unites Michals’s timeless, narrative sensibility with a performer who stars in two of the season’s most-anticipated literary adaptations: Elordi plays the monster in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which premiered at this summer’s Venice International Film Festival and begins streaming on Netflix this month, and he’ll star as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming remake of Wuthering Heights.

Michals aimed to capture his subject’s mysterious aura in his atmospheric shots. “Actors are professional dreamers,” he told me over the phone. “It’s not about documenting a star. It’s about making his magic visible.”

Narrative has always been key to Michals’s work. The photographer’s influences range from Rene Magritte and Giorgio di Chirico, masters of the visual surreal, to writers such as William Blake, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, who operated within the absurd and the sublime. In the 1960s, he embraced serial photography and multiple exposures to tell haunting stories with metaphysical elements. He often incorporated handwritten text into this work that was both associative and personal. Men are often his central subjects and hints at romance (or at least sex) seem to hover just outside the frames of his works.

In 1970, New York’s Museum of Modern Art gave Michals his first solo exhibition. The Morgan Library recently celebrated Michals’s decades-long career and relentlessly creative spirit in its 2019–20 show “Illusions of the Photographer.”

The new Bottega Veneta campaign neatly fits into Michals’s larger oeuvre. Over the decades, the photographer has shot for luxury labels and publications including Esquire, Mademoiselle and Vogue. In 1985, he collaborated with the brand for the first time. His advertisement featured a man holding a purse, the curve of his arm muscle echoing the shape of the bag’s bottom.

“They give me a great deal of liberty,” Michals said. “That’s brave of them, respectful of my point of view.” Bottega supported his desire to “not just duplicate a handbag” or “a good-looking person staring into a lens,” but to create drama and a sense of theater.

One endearing image from the new campaign epitomizes this dynamic. Michals, bald with a long white beard, stands on a ladder and dangles marionettes in front of Elordi, who sits at a wooden desk and gazes off to the side. The photographer becomes a benevolent puppet master, leading his handsome young charge into reverie.

The Michals campaign is another example of Bottega Veneta’s ongoing engagement with the art world. Earlier this year, the brand featured the sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud in their “Craft is our Language” campaign, shot by Jack Davison. And its new creative director Louise Trotter, formerly of the fashion line Carven, debuted her first collection this past September, earning accolades for both honoring the house’s craft heritage and using materials like fiberglass in creative new ways.

Michals, too, keeps pushing forward and discovering new ways to work. He produces a short movie each week and is creating a book about his recent films. And the exhibition “Duane Michals: The Nature of Desire,” which includes works inspired by poets such as Walt Whitman and Constantine Cavafy, is now on view at D.C. Moore Gallery through November 22.

Michals’s theatrical ability to delight and surprise extended to our personal conversations as well. At the end of the interview, he offered to sing a song. “In the month of May, something came my way,” he sang. “In my mountain greenery where god paints the scenery, just two happy people together. Think about that. Big hugs.”

ARTNET

 

[PDFSD]

useless ad again from BV
and could not agree more with this analyst comment :

Is it me or is Jacob Elordi everywhere?

Jacob Elordi with TAG Heuer.
Jacob Elordi with Bottega Veneta.
Jacob Elordi with Cartier.
Jacob Elordi with CHANEL No. 5 (with Margot Robbie).
Jacob Elordi with Loewe.
Jacob Elordi with Calvin Klein.
Jacob Elordi with HUGO BOSS


And I'm sure l'll leave out some.
And the same goes for A$AP Rocky...
With Christian Dior Couture, with Gucci, with Bottega Veneta, even with CHANEL.
And if anything was missing: GUESS?, Inc..


Don't get me wrong, I love Jacob.
He has impeccable style, laid-back elegance, and a camera that adores him.
He has a lot of vibes, his stylist loves him madly and in the Bottega Veneta campaign he is spectacular.

But lately... I see it everywhere. (Wait, the new season of Euphoria has to come out..)

And this isn't just about Jacob.

It's about how the industry is playing the same old game: it lives its own copy-paste of ambassadors.
The result?

That everything becomes interchangeable. The codes are diluted.
And we no longer know who represents whom.

Anyway, it used to be easier:
Models modeled, actors acted, and brands chose a face with a universe of its

 

[Lola701]

I’ll just puzzled by the purpose of the campaign. Clearly it’s not about clothes and accessories.
It’s not even institutional because it doesn’t really tells anything about the spirit of BV.
It’s just a very handsome man looking bored.
They should have turned it into a fragrance ad at this point.

 

[Milanese Fashion Dreams]

theres no storytelling thread in what bottega is doing lately im afraid.
As you rightfully mentioned Lola its just a handsome man looking bored
what exactly is the purpose of this campaign? i know fashion is not just commerce and $, but what are they trying to sell us through this campaign and which category is it supposed to drive traffic to exactly

 

[PDFSD]

Duane Michals at 93 years old revisited one of his earlier works for French Vogue, originally created for a text about quantum physics.

The idea was built around "Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle" (quantum physics) — the concept that we can’t know exactly where a tiny particle is and how fast it’s moving at the same time. The closer we get to knowing one, the less we know about the other. This isn’t a mistake — it’s simply how nature works. At the smallest level, everything is a bit uncertain or “fuzzy.”

In his words: “When my model even slightly moved, her image completely changed. Just like particles in nature — moving from one point to another through transformation.”



The top image is from the current campaign. The bottom one - from Vogue 1999.