For the new collaboration between Valentino Garavani and Vans, Creative Director Alessandro Michele explores what happens when the unexpected bursts into our lives, when what seemed solid dissolves under forces beyond our control.
“What happens when the unexpected bursts into our lives? Which sensations arise when what seemed solid dissolves under the blows of forces beyond our control?
I tried to build a reflection through images: In trying to answer these questions, I shaped a reflection through images: a dreamlike and surreal fresco where nature suddenly explodes, cracking the neat surface of architectures and technologies that surround us. It’s an unforeseen, even violent, impact that is able to shatter the illusion of stability and to get us back to a more vulnerable and fluid dimension. Which preludes to something new, though.
Water perfectly embodies such uncanny force: a primordial element, an undifferentiated matter that precedes any form, a womb that simultaneously nurtures and dissolves.
It’s the topos of the unconscious, that can crush the rational scaffolding of our existence. Water stirs, disorientates, abolishes the borders. It’s the archetype of threat, loss, return to the indistinct but also of rebirth and purification.
In this dream of liberation, water is the element that fractures the Euclidean space, that melts the rigid geometries, transfiguring life into a liquid stage where bodies and clothes move as suspended apparitions.
In between intimacy and catastrophe, abandon and resistance.
It’s the vertigo of dissolution. But also, the promise of a new beginning.” – Alessandro Michele says.
The campaign video and images were generated using Al, based on original visual material captured during the Valentino Le Méta-Théâtre Des Intimités show. All featured imagery was used with the informed consent of the models here portrayed and of all the talents involved in the execution of the show.
CREDITS
Creative Director: Alessandro Michele
Artwork: @EDGLRD
Music: @Aniports
Models:
Bukwop: @bukwopkir
Shane: @mama_trucker
Weiyi: @weiyifang_314
Paul: @paulthemontley