Dear Shaded Viewers,
I was thrilled to see this new campaign land, because Wing Shya is a photographer and director who has lived in the back of my mind for nearly two decades. His first fashion films premiered at my film festivals back in 2006, and I have followed the slow unfurling of his eye ever since — that particular way he has of making a still image breathe like a scene mid-cut, always arriving a beat before or after the moment you expected. So when I learned Valentino had called on him to shoot their Qixi 2026 campaign, it felt less like news and more like a rendezvous two decades in the making.
Valentino has unveiled a special campaign for Qixi, conceived by Creative Director Alessandro Michele and shot by Wing Shya, marking the Chinese festival often described as the country’s Valentine’s Day. Qixi is built on an old legend: two lovers permitted only one meeting a year, forever divided by a river of stars, forever finding their way back to each other. It is a festival less about arrival than about the ache before it — and no one photographs the ache before arrival quite like Wing Shya.
He shoots a bookshop the way Wong Kar-wai shoots a stairwell: not as a room but as a held breath. There is a curtain, and it does the work a hundred pages of dialogue could not — it is the membrane between what is confessed and what is only felt, between the version of the story we say out loud and the one we carry silently in a coat pocket. On one side of it, Lars Huang, Ami de la Maison and one of China’s most beloved actors and singers; on the other, models Yidan Huang and Zen Yue, all dressed in silhouettes from the Valentino Pre-Fall 2026 collection, all moving through the stacks like characters who have memorized each other’s schedules without ever agreeing to meet.
This is the same hand that helped build the visual language of Wong Kar-wai’s cinema — the cigarette smoke caught mid-drift, the clock that always seems to be running a few minutes ahead of the heart, the woman in the qipao who never quite turns around in time. Shya brings that same grammar of longing to Valentino: soft focus at the edges, light diffused as though filtered through rain on glass, colour that seems to remember rather than record. Nothing here is explained. Everything is implied — a gaze held one second too long, a hand grazing a spine of books instead of a shoulder, a distance closing so slowly it could be mistaken for standing still.
The bookshop itself becomes the third lover in the frame. Not a backdrop but a memory palace — shelves as accumulated lives, aisles as roads almost taken, the hush of a place built for people to be alone together. It is where the campaign locates its real subject: not the meeting itself, but the charged air just before it, the way two people can occupy the same room for the length of a page and never once resolve into a single sentence.
Woven through these quiet corridors are the pieces anchoring Valentino’s Pre-Fall 2026 story — the Valentino Garavani Panthea and DeVain bags, paired with silhouettes from the Rockstud family, each accessory less an object than a punctuation mark in a story that refuses full stops.
For Qixi 2026, Valentino chooses to celebrate what is never said aloud: the tension of waiting, the possibility folded inside an almost-encounter, and the invisible thread that keeps pulling two people back toward the same page, the same shelf, the same year, one more time.
Later,
Diane
Credits Artistic Director: Alessandro Michele Photographer: Wing Shya (@wingshya) Art Direction: See See See Studio (@see__see__see) Stylist: Luca Galasso (@lucagalasso) Talent: Lars Huang (@hzhf_larsss) Models: Yidan Huang (@yidan_33) & Zen Yue Photo Credits: Courtesy of Valentino
#ValentinoPreFall2026 #ValentinoGaravani #PantheaBag #DeVainBag
