Valentino Fireflies Advertising Campaign

Every body knows falling. Not as an accident, but as original condition. Balance, in fact, is not the natural state of being, but only a fragile interval within the becoming of things. Falling happens when the world no longer holds us in the forms we once knew. It takes but a moment: a yielding, a loss, a force that exceeds our capacity for containment.

Here is where this campaign begins, with the awareness of the provisional nature of verticality, constantly negotiated through the physical, symbolic, and relational supports that sustain our existence. In this frame, falling reveals the structural dependency that defines us, becoming a political vector capable of shattering the myth of self-sufficiency.

We can’t resist stumbling by individual will alone; we need the grace, the care, and the concern of those who try to hold us. In this posture, the presence of the other becomes a concrete practice that embraces vulnerability without denying it. Caring does not mean preventing the fall, it means making it inhabitable. It’s holding on to each other when balance breaks, sharing the weight rather than removing it, being there in the time of instability without forcing a solution.

The campaign’s shots seem to linger on the instant immediately before the fall: a suspended time, without direction. Here elegance, still intact but on the verge of fracturing, stands out within a historic building. In the video, the gaze moves beyond that threshold instead. This is where the fall stops being anticipated and becomes experienced, revealing an ontology of vulnerability that binds us all to a shared destiny. 

We stay, we catch, we hold up one another as we fall: this is the decisive gesture. No body stands on its own, we must accept that, because the most radical form of elegance does not lie in solidity, rather in the willingness to become support. Fashion, in this sense, does not stage strength. It displays the responsibility of the weight we bear: of the burdens, of what must be shared, and of what cannot be left to fall elsewhere.

This is not about aestheticizing fragility, but acknowledging it as a structural condition of existence: a starting point for imagining different forms of coexistence, responsibility, and relation. Falling, then, is not the end of movement, but the opening of a different posture, where every claim to self-sufficiency is exposed for what it is: a cultural fiction.

Alessandro