Review of Bottega Veneta ‘What Are Dreams’ Fall 2025 ad campaign by creative director Louise Trotter, with photographer Duane Michals and talent Jacob Elordi.
Bottega Veneta’s What Are Dreams opens as a quiet study in mood and material, a thoughtful merging of artistry and reflection. Conceived by Louise Trotter and brought to life by Duane Michals, the black-and-white series places Jacob Elordi within the quiet intimacy of Michals’ New York home. The result is a campaign that builds a world from small luxuries: a curtain’s movement, the curve of a mirror, the flicker of a feather suspended midair.
Michals, who has long explored surrealism’s poetic terrain, photographs Elordi in a sequence of twelve vignettes that play with perception and time. His motifs—billowing fabrics, convex reflections, handwritten text—return as though in a dream, each a fragment of memory or thought. Elordi reads from Michals’ 2001 poem What Are Dreams, lending the film a literary rhythm that feels intimate, even confessional. The collaboration invites reflection on the invisible architecture of artistry: what we choose to reveal, what remains just out of reach.
What stands out here is the intelligence of restraint. Trotter understands that real luxury today lies in discretion—the kind that allows space for wonder. By pairing Michals, whose surrealist sensibility shaped a generation of image-makers, with Elordi, whose presence carries both modernity and nostalgia, the house creates a rare intergenerational exchange. The work feels artisanal in spirit yet contemporary in tone, anchored by an honesty that runs through Bottega Veneta’s evolving language under Trotter’s direction.
What Are Dreams doesn’t seek to decode its title. Instead, it lingers in ambiguity, where imagination feels tactile and emotion feels designed. It’s a campaign that reminds us that refinement isn’t about clarity—it’s about curiosity. And here, Bottega Veneta lets the mystery do the talking.
Bottega Veneta Creative Director | Louise Trotter
Photographer & Videographer | Duane Michals
Talent | Jacob Elordi
Location | Duane Michals’ New York home