A new ad campaign by Italian luxury house Bottega Veneta features dreamy black-and-white images of actor Jacob Elordi, photographed by Duane Michals.
The collaboration is the first since Bottega creative director Louise Trotter debuted her first collection for the house during the Milan Spring 2026 shows in September.
Michals is best-known for his “Sequences” series of images that tell enigmatic tales that never fully resolve but are thrilling to witness and experience. He often accompanies them with short handwritten captions that set up the narrative to the body of work. Many of them feature a charged queer sensuality to them, as in his most famous work, 1968’s The Spirit Leaves the Body, in which the spirit a nude man lying on a bed appears to rise out from the body toward the camera. “My photographs are about questions. They are not about answers,” Michals once said in an interview.
Featuring a series of photographs and a video, the Bottega campaign, which was shot in Michals’s New York home, is titled “What Are Dreams,” taking its name from a 1994 image by Michals, accompanied by a handwritten poem. The image, showing a handsome young man who appears to be sleeping on a table next to a snow globe of the famed New York City landmarks, would later be published in Michal’s acclaimed book Questions Without Answers (2002).
In a moody intonation, Elordi, who resembles the young man from the three-decade-old image, reads the poem while sitting in a rocking chair. The poem’s first three lines are as follows: “Dreams are the midnight movies of the mind / where the sphinx recites his riddles to the blind, / and as our daydreams sleep our night dreams come awake.”
As Elordi, who stars in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein, streaming on Netflix beginning November 7, recites Michals’s words, we see video footage of the actor posing for Michals’s lens, producing a series of surrealist-inflected images. In a black T-shirt, he eyes a large white feather that moves about. Later, we see Michals, on a step stool, standing over Elordi dangling the feather from a wooden branch.
In a double-breasted suit jacket, we see Elordi first with his back to us, and then, simultaneously facing us. Next, two Elordis circle a miniature dress form. He stares into a circular mirror that distorts his face and then into a crystal gazing ball that inverts his face. Finally, he plays with three marionette dolls, which are also being manipulated by Michals.
See the full campaign at Bottega Veneta.
