Bottega Veneta reveals What Are Dreams, a new collaboration between Duane Michals and Jacob Elordi that merges film, photography, and poetry. The project consists of a short film and a set of 12 black-and-white images, all created inside Michals’ New York home. The setup reflects the photographer’s long artistic connection to surrealism, a thread present in his work since the 1960s.
Elordi becomes the central figure in a constructed dream-space filled with symbolic props: a curtain caught mid-air, a curved reflection inside a convex mirror, a pedestal tilted off balance, and a feather suspended as if frozen in time. These elements echo visual motifs that run through Michals’ body of work and reference artists he consistently cites, including Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte.
The film features Elordi reading Michals’ poem What Are Dreams, first published in the 2001 book Questions Without Answers. The text describes “midnight movies of the mind… where things look familiar, but not at all the same,” setting the tone for the collaboration. Michals’ handwritten excerpts from the poem appear across select images, extending his practice of merging photography and text into a single frame.
Reflecting on the process, Michals explains his core question as an artist: “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 project reconnects Michals with Bottega Veneta after shooting a campaign for the house in 1985, while Elordi enters this lineage as the brand’s Ambassador, appointed in May 2024. The collaboration pairs two figures from different generations, one shaping the language of staged photography, the other shaping contemporary screen masculinity, under a shared exploration of performance, perception, and image.
