Duane Michals Pictures Jacob Elordi for Bottega Veneta

A brand new advert marketing campaign by Italian luxurious home Bottega Veneta options dreamy black-and-white pictures of actor Jacob Elordi, photographed by Duane Michals.

The collaboration is the primary since Bottega inventive director Louise Trotter debuted her first collection for the home in the course of the Milan Spring 2026 exhibits in September.

Michals is best-known for his “Sequences” collection of pictures that inform enigmatic tales that by no means absolutely resolve however are thrilling to witness and expertise. He usually accompanies them with quick handwritten captions that arrange the narrative to the physique of labor. Many of them characteristic a charged queer sensuality to them, as in his most well-known work, 1968’s The Spirit Leaves the Body, by which the spirit a nude man mendacity on a mattress seems to rise out from the physique towards the digital camera. “My photographs are about questions. They are not about answers,” Michals as soon as stated in an interview.  

Featuring a collection of pictures and a video, the Bottega marketing campaign, which was shot in Michals’s New York house, is titled “What Are Dreams,” taking its identify from a 1994 picture by Michals, accompanied by a handwritten poem. The picture, displaying a good-looking younger man who seems to be sleeping on a desk subsequent to a snow globe of the famed New York City landmarks, would later be printed in Michal’s acclaimed e-book Questions Without Answers (2002).

In a moody intonation, Elordi, who resembles the younger man from the three-decade-old picture, reads the poem whereas sitting in a rocking chair. The poem’s first three strains 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 starting November 7, recites Michals’s phrases, we see video footage of the actor posing for Michals’s lens, producing a collection of surrealist-inflected pictures. In a black T-shirt, he eyes a big white feather that strikes about. Later, we see Michals, on a step stool, standing over Elordi dangling the feather from a picket department.

In a double-breasted go well with jacket, we see Elordi first together with his again to us, after which, concurrently going through us. Next, two Elordis circle a miniature costume type. He stares right into a round mirror that distorts his face after which right into a crystal gazing ball that inverts his face. Finally, he performs with three marionette dolls, that are additionally being manipulated by Michals.

See the full campaign at Bottega Veneta.