Under the creative direction of Alessandro Michele, Maison Valentino is effectively dissolving the boundary between the front row and the server room. To mark the arrival of the Valentino Garavani DeVain bag – a softer, deconstructed and fluid evolution of the Vain family introduced for Pre-Autumn 2025 – the House has bypassed the standard glossy campaign in favour of a digital hallucination.
The ‘DeVain Digital Creative Project’ hands the new accessory over to a constellation of nine international artists, and the first chapter reveals five diverse visions that treat the bag like a protagonist of a surrealist film.
The project leans heavily into the new frontier of image-making, with five of the featured talents – Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella, Animus Pax and Total Emotional Awareness – utilising Artificial Intelligence to warp reality.
Enter The Void, a visual artist who uses code to rebuild “the worlds of his childhood,” constructs a surreal “underwater desert hotel” inhabited by floating fish and drifting bags. Paul Octavious, a Chicago-based artist, remixes classical 16th-century portraiture with digital animation to embed the accessory into history, while Barcelona-based director Albert Planella blends AI with cinematic language to treat the bag as a metamorphic object suspended between lucidity and sleep.
Total Emotional Awareness (Christopher Royal King) leads viewers into a surreal realm where pop imagery merges with the DeVain, with expanding and multiplying forms accompanying a visionary journey through boundless geometries. Meanwhile, Animus Pax creates a series of stop-motion films in which the bag comes to life frame by frame, revealing its texture and personality through a poetic, tactile approach.
Given the complexities and controversies of generative art, the House has been explicitly transparent about the process, stating that “the video and images by artists Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella, Animus Pax and Total Emotional Awareness were generated using AI. All featured imagery by Enter The Void was used with the informed consent of the models here portrayed and of all the talents involved.”
Not everyone is relying on the algorithm, however. Other artists use different mediums to deconstruct the bag’s identity. Austrian photographer Thomas Albdorf, known for his constructed still lifes, traps the DeVain in a hall of mirrors, creating video loops where the accessory multiplies and transforms in a sculptural study of symmetry.
Bringing a more frantic, tactile energy is Tina Tona, a Rwandese and Ugandan visual storyteller based in Los Angeles. She uses mixed-media collage to view the accessory from multiple, chaotic perspectives, blending ‘anti-nihilism’ philosophy with vibrant textures and colour.
London-based photographer Annie Collinge constructs a dreamlike tableau, blending real objects and cut-out silhouettes to blur the boundaries between reality and play, inviting viewers into an immersive, ironic world. Similarly, Turkey-born conceptual artist, Z_Captures (Zeren Badar) sets the universe of the DeVain in bold contrast with everyday pop objects, creating striking visual collisions that fuse fantasy and pop culture.
It is a fittingly experimental launch for a bag named ‘DeVain’ (a play on the tension between the divine and the vain).
Available in a staggering twenty-seven variations, ranging from denim and crochet raffia to crystal-embellished shearling, the DeVain bag is now available in boutiques worldwide –complete with a customisable leather tag for that final touch of ego.
Find out more here.
words. Gennaro Costanzo
photography + videography. courtesy of Tina Tona, Thomas Albdorf, Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella, Annie Collinge, Z_Captures, Animus Pax, Total Emotional Awareness
The video and images by artists Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Animus Pax, Total Emotional Awareness and Albert Planella were generated using AI. All featured imagery by Enter The Void was used with the informed consent of the models here portrayed and of all the talents involved.
