Jacob Elordi Turned a Bottega Veneta Front Row Moment Into the Brand's Biggest PR Story of 2026
Bottega Veneta hired Elordi as a global ambassador in 2024 and made a 76-second art film with him. It has 480,000 YouTube views and 14 comments. The same ambassador photographed his girlfriend closing the brand's Milan show, and celebrity outlets ran it globally.
Bottega Veneta's official "What Are Dreams" film runs 76 seconds and has 480,000 YouTube views. It has 14 comments. By any standard metric, the comment rate of 0.003 percent is roughly 30 to 300 times lower than a video of that view count would typically carry. Bottega restricts engagement on its YouTube content by design. The number is not a failure. It is a policy.
The same ambassador who appears in that film, Australian actor Jacob Elordi, delivered what may be the brand's most broadly covered PR moment of 2026 without a campaign brief. On September 26, he sat front row at Bottega Veneta's spring/summer 2027 Milan show and photographed Kendall Jenner as she closed the finale, per Dazed Digital. The image landed in celebrity news globally. Its audience was not Bottega's usual audience.
What Bottega Actually Bought in 2024
WWD announced the partnership in 2024. Elordi joined a roster that at the time also included RM of BTS and Taiwanese actress Shu Qi: a range of cultural references with nothing in common except that none of them were Instagram influencers. Bottega Veneta under creative director Matthieu Blazy had made a point of choosing culture-adjacent figures over follower count.
The "What Are Dreams" film, which Bottega released in November 2025, pairs Elordi with Duane Michals, the 92-year-old American photographer who also shot a Bottega Veneta campaign in 1985. In the film, Elordi recites Michals' poem of the same name from Michals' 2001 book Questions Without Answers. The shoot took place at Michals' New York home. The images are black-and-white and surrealist in register.
The comment thread that the film did allow tells you something. "I could listen to this man talk for hours," reads the most-liked response. "This is why I love Bottega and I love Mister Elordi," reads another. The campaign coverage from Hypebae described the project as a twelve-image series alongside the short film.
The Front Row Outperformed the Film
Kendall Jenner is not a Bottega Veneta ambassador. Her appearance as the closing model at the brand's Milan show, with Elordi watching from the front row in full Bottega look, created a category of coverage the brand does not normally receive: celebrity gossip. Paparazzi angles, relationship confirmation stories, style breakdowns. Elordi's public relationship with Jenner reached outlets that cover neither runway shows nor luxury fashion.
That coverage is not attributable to a campaign, a PR brief, or a media spend. It is an externality of choosing an ambassador whose personal life generates tabloid interest on its own. Bottega got the art-world credibility from the Michals film and the celebrity gossip reach from the Milan show, and paid directly only for the first one.
The Case for Restraint
The luxury fashion industry has been sorting itself into two camps for the last several years: brands that chase social media scale and brands that maintain deliberate scarcity of access. Bottega Veneta has been among the clearest examples of the second camp. It left Instagram in 2021. It runs ads in print. It maintains a YouTube channel with 14 comments on its most-watched film. Its bet is that the right ambassador does not need to be an influencer because the right ambassador's life is already interesting.
Elordi's next major project, the Hollow remake in which he is reportedly in final talks to play Ichabod Crane opposite Sydney Sweeney, would extend his profile further. Each film adds another layer of cultural presence that the brand did not pay for and cannot manufacture. That is the transaction Bottega Veneta was making in 2024 when it chose an actor who was not yet a household name. It is now paying off on the terms they were probably hoping for.
Bottega Veneta has not publicly commented on its ambassador strategy or on the terms of its deal with Elordi. Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site and has no affiliation with Jacob Elordi, Bottega Veneta, Kendall Jenner, or any party named in this article.
Sources & further reading
- WWD: Bottega Veneta Debuts Jacob Elordi as Newest Brand Ambassador (2024)
- Hypebae: Jacob Elordi Bottega Veneta 'What Are Dreams' Film Campaign (November 2025)
- Dazed Digital: Bottega Veneta SS27 Milan Fashion Week, Jacob Elordi and Kendall Jenner (September 2026)
- Bottega Veneta official YouTube: 'What are Dreams by Bottega Veneta', 480,043 views, 14 comments, uploaded November 3, 2025 (stats pulled November 6, 2026)
