Bottega Veneta: Jacob Elordi in Duane Michals’ Short Film
Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who has represented Bottega Veneta since 2024, stars in the fashion house’s creative project “What Are Dreams.” The work includes both a short film and a photographic series by American artist Duane Michals.
According to the brand, the film was shot in black and white at Michals’s New York home and draws on his deep affinity for Surrealism. The project aims to explore themes of the unconscious, imagination, and strangeness.
“Shot in black and white at Michals’s home in New York, the project springs from the artist’s deep connection to Surrealism and seeks to explore the unconscious, the imaginary and the uncanny,” the house explained.
In the short film, Elordi recites Michals’s poem “What Are Dreams,” first published in the artist’s 2001 photobook Questions Without Answers. The poem, which gives the project its name, reflects on the “midnight movies of the mind... in which things seem familiar, yet not quite the same.”
The accompanying twelve-photograph series shows Elordi in a sequence of mysterious and lyrical settings, maintaining the poetic visual language that has distinguished Michals’s work since the 1960s. The imagery subtly references the Surrealist painters Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, whose influence remains evident in Michals’s art.
Author’s Summary
This project unites actor Jacob Elordi and legendary photographer Duane Michals in an exploration of surreal dreams, memory, and illusion for Bottega Veneta’s “What Are Dreams.”