Bottega Veneta: Jacob Elordi stars in Duane Michals short film

A Bottega Veneta brand ambassador since 2024, Australian actor Jacob Elordi fronts the house’s “What Are Dreams” project, a short film and photographic series by U.S. photographer, Duane Michals.

“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 the poem “What Are Dreams”, written by Michals, born in 1932, and published in 2001 in his photobook, “Questions Without Answers”. The poem, which lends the project its title, evokes the “midnight movies of the mind… in which things seem familiar, yet not quite the same.”

The 12-photograph series portrays the actor in enigmatic, poetic settings, in keeping with the style that has made the photographer famous since the 1960s. Some visual references hark back to the Surrealist artists the photographer has always admired, particularly Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte.