Valentino Garavani x Vans 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Valentino Garavani x Vans Ad Campaign by Artist EDGLRD with Bukwop Kir, Shane Stevens, Weiyi Fang, and Paul Scally

The Valentino Garavani x Vans Fall 2025 campaign is an unexpected collision of streetwear grit and couture surrealism, and it makes a splash—literally. Set in the same red-tiled bathroom Alessandro Michele unveiled for his Valentino Fall runway, the video and stills transform the mundane into a dreamlike stage where water becomes both menace and muse.

The opening eye shot, shifting from Valentino’s “V” to Vans’ checkerboard insignia, is a clever visual thesis: two worlds blinking into one. What follows unfolds like a fever dream. Faucets drip and tiles bleed into color before torrents of water flood the space. Models step backwards in slow resistance, Vans sneakers and Valentino handbags caught in the swell. The bathroom becomes ocean, an uncanny blend of containment and release. By the time the characters are wading through ankle-deep waves, or reclining in a bathtub filling from the outside, the campaign has dissolved any boundary between luxury and skate culture.

Visually, the work is hypnotic. Artist EDGLRD, together with Bukwop Kir, Shane Stevens, Weiyi Fang, and Paul Scally, orchestrates a cinematic rhythm that plays with tension and release, black-and-white and Valentino red, solidity and dissolution. Water is more than aesthetic flourish—it’s metaphor. The press release calls it “the archetype of threat, loss, return, but also rebirth and purification,” and that symbolism resonates. Vans’ grounded skater codes meet Valentino’s penchant for mythmaking in a shared pool of reinvention.

What makes this collaboration particularly sharp is its refusal to stay in one register. It’s neither just an art film nor simply product placement, but an interrogation of fashion as spectacle. The shoes, emblazoned with dual Valentino and Vans insignia, are both the anchor and the driftwood—sturdy enough to withstand the flood, symbolic enough to carry the campaign’s philosophical weight. The transition to the beach scene underscores this movement from constraint to release, from tiled rigidity to boundless horizon.

If the video is arresting, the stills distill its mood into tactile precision. Checkerboard Vans set against rippling red tiles, water lapping at their edges, become icons of fluid rebellion. The imagery manages to sell sneakers and handbags while also holding space for reflection—about identity, instability, and the allure of transformation.

Ultimately, Valentino x Vans is about collapse and convergence. The collapse of categories—luxury versus street, stability versus chaos—and the convergence of two design languages into something new. It’s seductive, a little destabilizing, and very effective. The campaign makes water its co-star, proving that sometimes fashion’s boldest moves come when it lets itself be carried by the tide.