There is a moment, just before night comes, when the Valentino Cruise 2026 campaign—Nocturne—decides to inhabit that suspended threshold where sleep and wake become porous. It happens in a hotel, liminal space par excellence, where intimacy and anonymity coexist and transience turns into permanence. Creative Director Alessandro Michele orchestrates a ritual of collective abandonment: singular existences—Marisa Berenson, Dev Hynes, Anne Imhof, Dakota Johnson, Tate McRae, Devon Teuscher—barely touching one another, yet sharing the gesture of surrendering to sleep. Each room becomes a fragment of universe, a human hive where parallel solitudes breathe within the same time through thin walls. The hotel emerges as metaphor for contemporary condition: proximity without contact, where what is most private transfigures into shared experience. Chopin's Nocturne in E Flat, performed by Angus Pendergast, acts as sonorous texture giving voice to the buried time of night. A time pervaded by objectless waiting, where tensions loosen and light stops judging. Directed by Renell Medrano and photographed by Marili Andre, the campaign captures this pervasive repetition of isolated gestures. It's the threshold where, as Freud would say, dream begins to think for us. A world that, for a fleeting instant, allowed itself to sleep together.
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