Dakota Johnson, Tate McRae, Devon Teuscher and more in Valentino’s Nocturne campaign

There is a moment when the day gives way and the night has not yet claimed its territory. It is a suspended space, a blurred boundary where the limits between wakefulness and sleep dissolve. Consciousness, tired of sustaining its weight, slowly begins to surrender. In that transition, reality softens, words shed their meaning, and light becomes an accomplice.

Valentino‘s Nocturne campaign chooses to inhabit precisely this threshold. Its narrative unfolds within a hotel where anonymity, intimacy and transience converge. Inside each room, everyday life is transformed into a cinematic scene. The hotel, with its endless corridors and impersonal architecture, becomes a metaphor for the present: a collective refuge where lives brush against each other without touching, where loneliness and intimacy are shared without being named.

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In Nocturne, night is not the absence of light but narrative material. It is the fabric that binds fragmented existences together: guests who cohabit in unconscious synchrony, bodies that, as they surrender to rest, participate in the same silent ritual. Each room is a capsule of the world, a microcosm where sleep becomes a political gesture: relinquishing control, allowing the mind to stop thinking for itself.

The creative direction transforms this liminal state into a precise aesthetic: deep tones, textures that border on the tactile, metallic flashes that evoke a suspended modernity. The lighting eschews artifice and falls like a sigh, while the human body takes centre stage. Everything is designed to convey that feeling of dissolution: a universe in which the solid vanishes, where the visible folds inwards.

Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major acts as the invisible soundtrack to the story. It is not a simple accompaniment, but a texture that envelops the experience. Its melody, melancholic and luminous, marks the pulse of a suspended time. It is the breath of the night turned into sound. A purposeless wait, a desire without destination. The music here functions as the thread that ties together the scattered: different lives, different dreams, different ways of being alone and yet together.

In its symbolic dimension, Nocturne presents itself as a poetic interpretation of the contemporary condition. A visual commentary on the way we inhabit the present: connected but isolated, close but intangible. The hotel becomes a laboratory for these modern tensions, a territory where collectivity and solitude coexist in perfect balance. Each image, each restrained gesture reflects this paradox: the need to share a common space without renouncing the distance that sustains it.

Aesthetically, the campaign aligns with the new sensibility of contemporary luxury: sober, introspective, emotional. Far from ostentation, Nocturne focuses on atmosphere, on details that are barely perceptible but alter the experience. Clothing, objects, bodies and light compose a choreography that transcends fashion to enter the realm of the sensory.

Freud said that dreams are where our thoughts continue without us. Nocturne seems to confirm this. The moment the lights in the corridor go out and the murmur of the city fades away, another kind of thinking begins: one made up of images, unconfessable desires, memories and the future. The campaign does not seek to represent this experience; it proposes it as a shared experience.

This is Valentino Garavani’s Vans Authentic, designed by Alessandro Michele.