Valentino Pre-Fall 26 Campaign

Cy Twombly’s Palazzo, tucked away in Bassano in Teverina, is a place immersed in a weave of time and matter. Cy Twombly purchased the villa in 1975, making it his sanctuary for over thirty years – a creative laboratory where his work could slowly sediment within the tufa walls, away from the urban roar. Twombly lived here with ascetic simplicity, opening his doors only to a close-knit circle of friends and collaborators. 

On this quiet, intimate threshold some of his most defining workstook shape. Even today, the palazzo retains a profound stillness – untimely, gloriously out of step with the present. Every surface bears the marks and gestures of a past that feels very much alive. Twombly’s presence remains palpable, like an interior landscape woven into the very fabric of the architecture.

The Pre-Fall 2026 campaign takes shape within this constellation of echoes and presences. Cy Twombly’s Palazzo is more than a backdrop here; it operates as an intentional gesture, a reactivation of a specific genealogy of the gaze. Indeed, the entire project unfolds along a broader trajectory, one rooted in the very history of Maison Valentino. In 1968, Henry Clarke photographed Valentino Garavani’s white collection inside Cy Twombly and Tatia Franchetti’s Roman apartment for Vogue US. 

Today, the campaign unfolds within another of the artist’s homes – a way of rendering both distance and continuity visible at once. This is not about returning to a familiar visual archive, but rather intercepting a deeper vibration, allowing it to resurface in unexpected forms. It is an exploration of persistence – not meant as a static permanence, but as a trace that cuts through time and transforms.

A line that breaks, deviates, and refracts into the present, generating shifts, slippages, and new possibilities of meaning.

In the 1968 images, the figures are staged – composed and contained – within a pre-existing geometry. Their white garments become a form of discipline, shaping an equilibrium where fashion leans into space, extending its stability. By contrast, the Pre-Fall 2026 campaign unveils a fracture, or rather, an opening. Space is no longer a container but a sensitive surface; the body does not settle there, it moves through it, disrupting it, setting it back in motion. 

Untamed hair, an elusive gaze, and the vibration of fabric introduce an unstable, almost atmospheric dimension. Color erupts, shattering that unity: where there was an immobilizing pose, there is now a gesture that escapes fixity. The entire narrative turns around a figure charged with energy, momentum, and instability. No longer a presence standing neatly within a space, but a body that questions and pulls taut an environment still inhabited – where the work of Cy Twombly and the visual memory of Valentino Garavani continue to resonate.

The Pre-Fall 2026 campaign video makes this mechanism explicit and pushes it further. It stages the relationship between body and space as a continuous flow where presence, memory, and movement interweave without ever settling into a fixed form. Temporalities unfold at different speeds and along divergent trajectories. The dialogue feels intimate, rarefied, almost surreal. It seeks no explanations; it opens a threshold. As if space itself begins to speak. Or perhaps it is Twombly's voice, echoing.

Through hesitations, deviations, and suspensions, a quiet dissonance surfaces: the sense of not fully coinciding with one’s own gestures. The dialogue does not resolve this fracture – it embraces it, allowing something else to emerge. Not the reassembling of identity, but the loosening of it: the interruption of the need to explain oneself, an acceptance that the subject can exist as a shifting field, traversed by multiple states.