Review of Valentino Beauty “Born in Roma” Spring 2026 Ad Campaign by Artists Infiniteyay, Daily Splice, Xeocho, Chrissie Abbott, Andrew Knives, Maria Ines Guil, and Simon Bailley
Valentino Beauty’s latest chapter for Born in Roma unfolds less like a conventional fragrance campaign and more like a curated digital exhibition—one that trades a singular visual statement for a chorus of artistic voices. In this project, the Maison entrusts its most recognizable emblem, the studded pink Born in Roma bottle, to seven digital artists, inviting them not to reinvent the icon, but to refract it through their own imaginative lenses. The result is a body of work that feels fluid, introspective, and culturally attuned, positioning Born in Roma as both object and idea.
Rather than anchoring the campaign in a unified aesthetic, Valentino Beauty embraces multiplicity. Each artist—Andrew Knives, Simon Bailly, Chrissie Abbott, Infiniteyay, Daily Splice, Xeocho, and Maria Ines Guil—approaches the bottle as a narrative trigger rather than a static luxury artifact. Some interpretations unfold through motion, others through illustration or abstraction, but all orbit the same gravitational pull: the bottle’s geometric studs, its unmistakable pink hue, and its symbolic weight as a marker of individuality. The visuals feel playful without tipping into novelty, polished without becoming predictable.
Movement plays a key role early on. Andrew Knives’ animated interpretation introduces Born in Roma as a fleeting, sensorial experience—“a sudden lift, like stepping into a warm light”—where everything feels immersive and momentary. It’s a subtle but effective repositioning of fragrance as something temporal rather than fixed, aligning scent with sensation rather than status. Simon Bailly’s graphic world, by contrast, offers the campaign its most overt narrative structure: a young woman navigating a multicolored labyrinth, discovering herself through reflection, and emerging into light. The metaphor is clear but resonant, framing Born in Roma as a catalyst for self-recognition and choice rather than destination.
Chrissie Abbott’s retro-futurist dreamscape adds a temporal complexity that mirrors Valentino’s broader brand language—heritage in dialogue with the future. Her work exists, as she describes, “in the past and the future all at once,” allowing color, form, and abstraction to carry emotional weight without over-explaining. This tension between eras becomes a recurring theme, reinforcing Born in Roma’s identity as a modern classic: grounded in tradition, but never bound by it.
The campaign’s engagement with technology—particularly AI—pushes the project firmly into contemporary cultural territory. Infiniteyay’s use of AI as an imaginative tool rather than a spectacle reframes technology as an extension of creative intuition, while Xeocho’s “The world bends for the blossom” explores the porous boundaries between nature and machine. In both cases, AI feels conceptually aligned with fragrance itself: invisible, emotional, and deeply subjective, offering form to what is otherwise unseen.
Daily Splice and Maria Ines Guil bring the project back to tactility and emotion. Daily Splice translates the light patterns of the bottle’s glass into a Mediterranean-inspired digital odyssey, connecting Rome’s sensory textures—sound, movement, light—to the object itself. Guil’s illustrated works, steeped in Jungian symbolism, fairy tales, and “everyday poetry,” offer the campaign its most human register. Her nocturnal hues and dreamlike contrasts frame Born in Roma as “a meandering journey of a rebellious and daring scent,” a description that feels less like copy and more like a quiet manifesto.
Taken together, the campaign succeeds by resisting over-definition. Born in Roma has always positioned itself as a fragrance of individuality—classic yet disruptive, elegant yet irreverent—and this digital gallery feels like a natural extension of that ethos. If there’s room for growth, it lies in synthesis. While the plurality of voices is a strength, a more pronounced connective thread between the works could elevate the project from curated exhibition to fully immersive world-building.
Still, Valentino Beauty understands something essential about contemporary luxury: meaning is no longer dictated, but invited. Here, Born in Roma becomes motion, mirror, labyrinth, blossom, and dream—proof that when an icon is allowed to loosen its edges, it doesn’t lose its identity. It multiplies it.
Artists | Infiniteyay, Daily Splice, Xeocho, Chrissie Abbott, Andrew Knives, Maria Ines Guil, and Simon Bailley
