Two icons, Valentino Garavani and California’s streetwear titan Vans, released their first-ever AI-generated campaign. More than just showcasing a limited sneaker capsule, the partnership marks a milestone where couture vision, digital artistry, and ethical innovation converge. The project is a creative dialogue between two distinct worlds, where authenticity and individuality shine through a digital lens.
Table of Contents
How the AI Campaign Works
- AI as Creative Partner: The campaign’s visuals, both video and still images, were generated entirely by AI, starting with high-resolution film and photography captured at Valentino’s Le Méta-Théâtre Des Intimités Fall/Winter 2025-26 runway show in Paris. The digital studio EDGLRD, renowned for its art/tech hybrid work, reinvented this material into a surreal, fluid narrative: models striding across checkerboard-tiled bathrooms, wading through water, then appearing windswept on abstract beaches, all in a vivid palette featuring Valentino red.
- Ethical Firsts: Amid global conversation around AI’s role in fashion, Valentino made informed consent of all portrayed models and creative talent central to the campaign, directly addressing concerns about deepfake tech and digital likenesses. All featured imagery was used with the informed consent of the models, setting a transparency benchmark for AI-generated cultural content.
- Creative Direction: The vision comes from Alessandro Michele, Valentino’s recently appointed creative director. Water serves as the project’s core metaphor, a primordial force that disrupts the rational order while clearing the path for renewal, Michele explains. “allowing worlds to collide, dissolving what seems permanent so something unexpected can emerge.”
The Collection: Couture Meets Skate Heritage
- Design: The core of the collaboration is a reimagining of the Vans Authentic, the classic silhouette introduced in 1966. Under Michele’s hand, six new designs emerge, each with canvas uppers, checkerboard prints, co-branded insoles, and packaging that fuses Vans’ skater DNA with Valentino’s VLogo Signature. One stand-out version—the whimsical Le Chat de la Maison—is available only at Valentino boutiques and the Oxford Street Vans flagship in London.
Surrealist Storytelling: Campaign Details
- Visual Atmosphere: The campaign’s video opens in stark monochrome, shifting rapidly to splashes of color: crimson tiles, water surges, dramatic outdoor scenes. The AI-generated imagery warps conventional form, exaggerating surrealism, motion, and whimsy. Checkerboard patterns appear in electric green with oversized orange leaves, in pink stamped with Valentino’s monogram, and in red-and-black iterations that pulse with graphic intensity, notes one industry review.
- Narrative: The campaign explores what happens when the unexpected bursts into our lives, when what seemed solid dissolves under forces beyond our control. The project is about allowing worlds to collide, dissolving what seems permanent so something unexpected can emerge.
- Artwork and Music: Surreal visuals were animated by EDGLRD (the creative studio founded by filmmaker Harmony Korine) with music by Ayan Issin, completing the offbeat and cinematic effect that bridges physical and digital storytelling.
Why It Matters: Ethics, Style, and the Next Wave
- Ethics & Innovation: By prioritizing consent and transparency, the project lays groundwork for responsible AI artistry—addressing one of the sector’s hottest controversies as generative design tools become widespread. As AI faces new legal and ethical questions in the fashion world, Valentino’s campaign foregrounded model and creative protections.
- Style and Cultural Relevance: The collab bridges skatewear’s utilitarian heritage and couture’s whimsy, suggesting that growing consumer interest in cultural crossover is not yet dead, with younger shoppers drawn to authenticity and hybrid narratives.
What’s Next? The Future of AI in Fashion
Valentino Garavani and Vans are not alone—other luxury leaders from Gucci to Balenciaga are exploring generative visuals and AI-aided design to draw new audiences and probe questions of authorship, value, and beauty. For Valentino, the Vans campaign signals a repositioning of its Garavani accessories as not just products, but platforms for tech-driven storytelling—and a bold new chapter for the house under Alessandro Michele’s creative leadership.
