The Stage Is Cy Twombly's Mansion. Valentino Releases Latest Visuals Using the Artist's "Sanctuary" as the Stage
Valentino unveiled its 2026 pre-fall campaign, staging visuals where body and memory intersect within Cy Twombly's mansion.Summary
Valentino has released its 2026 pre-fall campaign. The stage is a palazzo in Bassano in Teverina, Italy, where Cy Twombly, a leading figure of American Abstract Expressionism, purchased in 1975 and lived for over 30 years. Under creative direction by Alessandro Michele, this space served as Twombly's "sanctuary" away from urban noise and a site for creative experimentation; today, traces of his gestures and marks remain embedded in its porous limestone walls, interweaving the artist's presence with the architecture itself (now operated by the Iris Foundation as a center for art and culture). In 1968, photographer Henry Clarke shot Valentino Garavani's White Collection in a Roman apartment where Twombly and Tatiana Franchetti lived, and this campaign visually connects distance and continuity by staging another of the artist's former homes. In the visuals, the body is not static but crosses, wavers, and disrupts the space, emphasizing instability and poetic sensibility resonant with Twombly's world through unruly hair, unfixed gazes, and shifting fabrics. Fashion photography exceeds its form as architecture, memory, and corporeality intersect in complex ways. The campaign film expresses a fluid state where existence, memory, and movement constantly intertwine.
(Source：美術手帖)