A mirror doesn’t just reflect a picture: it shapes it.
A symbol of knowledge, illusion and metamorphosis since ancient times, the looking glass is immortalised in art as the threshold between reality and imagination. While Jacques Lacan identified it as the place where identity itself takes shape, it is through our reflection that we see ourselves, but also imagine ourselves differently.
These ideas and more take shape in Mirror, Mirror: Esquire’s photographic project dedicated to Stud Up, the new Valentino Garavani trainer by creative director Alessandro Michele. Poised to become one of the most sought-after fashion items for the season, these trainers are set to be one of the defining models of the 2026 wardrobe. More than an accessory, the Stud Up is a declaration of style; a trainer that's alive with contrasts, callbacks and constant evolution—the fruit of Alessandro Michele’s creative universe.
Reinventing runners through a sophisticated dialogue between suede, leather and nylon, vibrant palettes, and different materials, the Stud Up marries the Maison’s language with the energy of contemporary sportswear. The result is a model that lends itself to daytime looks just as much as formal evening wear, with the strip of studs embracing the instep like a jewel. Alongside it, is the butterfly, the star of the Autumn/Winter 2026 collection and a recurring symbol in Michele’s vision. An emblem of lightness and metamorphosis, the butterfly adds motion and facets to the trainer, underscoring its mutable nature.
Like a hall of mirrors, Michele's vision is reflected over and over again, until it's viewed in a new light. With a mix of interweaving memory and modernity, legacy and reinvention, sartorial rigour and decorative fantasy, the Stud Up draws from Valentino Garavani’s historic style codes. You'll find iconic studs, butterfly motifs, precious palettes and vintage-flavoured details that have been reinvented.
Those same ideas inform the project’s photographic lexicon. It evokes digital manipulation and the infinite possibilities of AI, but its methods run counter to that. No post-production artifice, or generated imagery; the photo set is built by hand, from mirrored surfaces modelled one by one to create distortions, optical illusions and unexpected points of view. Through reflective surfaces, everything is captured live inside a photo studio. It's an interplay of refraction and light, that's edited painstakingly through composition.
This approach inevitably calls back to Melvin Sokolsky, who revolutionised modern photography by creating suspended worlds and optical illusions before the digital era. Like in his pictures, the reflections aren’t just a trick, but a visual language: a narrative tool that can multiply matter, amplify details, and entice the eye to linger.
Walter Benjamin said each artwork has an “aura”, the unique imprint of the human gesture that created it. In an age dominated by speed, technical reproducibility and pictures generated in a handful of seconds, Mirror, Mirror chooses to bring back that intrinsic quality: not just the aura of the photographed object, but that of the photograph itself.
Because today, true luxury isn't merely about owning an extraordinary fetish object. It involves giving it an equally extraordinary look. As though, before a mirror, one would discover that no reflection reveals a single image, but rather becomes open to interpretation.
