Fashion house Bottega Veneta introduces What Are Dreams, a new project created with Duane Michals and actor Jacob Elordi. The release includes a short film and a series of 12 black-and-white photographs, all produced at Michals’ home in New York. The project continues the photographer’s lifelong interest in surrealism, a theme that has shaped his work since the 1960s.
Michals stages Elordi in scenes built around poetic visual cues: a curtain filled with air, a mirrored reflection bend, a tilted pedestal, and a feather caught in suspension. These images draw from motifs that repeat throughout Michals’ archive and reference artists he has long admired, especially Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte. Elordi appears inside these constructed moments, leaning into the uncanny mood that defines the series.
The film features Elordi reading What Are Dreams, a poem Michals wrote and published in his 2001 book Questions Without Answers. The poem describes “midnight movies of the mind… where things look familiar, but not at all the same,” a line that anchors the tone of the entire collaboration. Michals often uses handwritten text as an extension of his photography, and excerpts of the poem appear directly over several images in his signature script.
Speaking on the project, Michals explains his ongoing question: how to show what cannot be seen. “I’m very much interested in the realm of the invisible. My problem is how do I make the invisible visible? Of course movie making is also a dream, and Frankenstein is a scary dream. Jacob understood exactly what I was trying to do with the project. He was right there for the magic and the mystery of it.”
The collaboration connects two phases of Michals’ relationship with the house. He photographed a Bottega Veneta campaign in 1985, and Elordi joined as Brand Ambassador in May 2024. The project brings together two artists from different eras and mediums, reinforcing Bottega Veneta’s ongoing focus on creative exchange across disciplines.
