Valentino has released its Qixi Festival 2026 campaign, a spare and atmospheric project shot inside a bookshop that trades spectacle for stillness. Conceived by artistic director Alessandro Michele and photographed by Wing Shya, the images arrive ahead of the August 17 festival, China’s version of a lovers’ holiday, rooted in a centuries-old legend about two fated partners who meet only once a year.
Michele and Shya chose the unglamorous location on purpose. Rows of shelves, quiet corners, and a single curtain separating one space from another. Nothing about it screams luxury advertising, and that restraint is the point. Shya, best known for his long collaboration with filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, brings the same hazy, half-lit intimacy he perfected in Hong Kong cinema to these stills. His camera lingers rather than announces itself.
Chinese singer and actor Lars Huang appears alongside models Yidan Huang and Zen Yue. They are all dressed in pieces from Valentino’s Pre-Fall 2026 collection. They pass each other in the aisles, sometimes nearly touching and sometimes not, but the campaign never explains what, if anything, connects them. This ambiguity feels deliberate rather than lazy. Anticipation carries more weight here than any resolved encounter, and Michele seems comfortable leaving viewers without a tidy answer.
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The three protagonists drift through the space as strangers do in an actual bookstore: brushing past one another, pausing, and moving on. Readers may recognize the discomfort of almost speaking to someone and then not. Shya’s soft focus and diffused light blur the line between a real afternoon and a remembered one. This suits Qixi’s themes of longing and delayed reunion far better than a literal love scene would.
Beneath the mood, however, there is product, and Valentino does not hide it. The campaign spotlights the Panthea and DeVain bags from the Valentino Garavani collection, paired with Rockstud-family footwear from the Pre-Fall lineup. Neither piece dominates a frame. They rest on a shoulder or in a hand, as accessories do in daily life, not staged for maximum visibility. This approach aligns with the campaign’s understated tone rather than a more declarative style.
Qixi, often described as Chinese Valentine’s Day, commemorates a cowherd and a weaver girl who are separated by the Milky Way and allowed to meet once a year. For years, Western luxury brands have used the holiday to court Chinese consumers, but the tone of those campaigns varies widely, ranging from glossy romance to something closer to melancholy. Valentino’s version falls firmly into the latter category, favoring hesitation over certainty.
