.jpg)
All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
For Valentine’s Day this year, New York’s Dream Baby Press—known for its cult love/hate lists by the likes of Kacey Musgraves and Cat Cohen—has teamed up with Valentino to celebrates love through the written word. Under the creative direction of Alessandro Michele, the Valentino team reached out to Matt Starr, a co-founder of the press, about curating love letters in honor of the holiday. It was a perfect fit: “I’m obsessed with old love letters, and love letters in general as a way of expressing yourself,” Starr tells Vogue. “They’re so private and filled with passion, and I loved the idea that people around the world could take these pre-written love letters and personalize them for someone.”
The project’s appointed love-letter authors—actor and artist Jemima Kirke, musician and writer Brontez Purnell, writer MacKenzie Thomas, author Coco Mellors, novelist Jerry Stahl, and Starr himself—span contemporary literature and culture, their missives incorporating all the lust, intimacy, humor, and contradictions that animate a good romance. And from February 12 to 14, you can have one of those texts handwritten on special Valentino stationary and addressed to a lover in-store.
“Knowing you / has stretched me into shapes / I didn’t know I could make. / My funhouse mirror. / How beautiful it is to be seen / as so much more,” reads MacKenzie Thomas’s note.
“I wanna lick your fingers one by one until I’m full,” reads Starr’s.
“Every writer and artist we chose is someone whose work I admire and love,” Starr says. “These are all my favorite writers. Jerry Stahl told me this is his first and only poem he’s ever written and it surprised the both of us. It’s hot and the exact type of letter I’d want to receive.”
Time has yielded torrid romance-sparking, revolution-starting, bed-rumpling love letters; physical notes signed, sealed, delivered, straight from the heart. So what makes a good one? “For me personally, I think you have to try to tap into your most private, uninhibited thoughts and feelings and get those down on paper,” Starr says. “You want to express all the things you want to do to the person and the places you want to take them and the things they make you feel. Every dirty and beautiful thought you have. You have to fight off any shame you feel when you’re trying to express yourself. At least this is what I’d like to receive in a love letter.”
Pop culture and history at large are rife with lovelorn notes: Artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, for example, exchanged over 5,000 across a 30-year relationship, their letters feeling both lusty and saucy—a true juxtaposition to her soft, dreamy paintings. There’s also Kurt Vonnegut and his wife Jane Marie Cox’s compelling collection, which were made into a book. “There’s one letter he wrote to her while he was in the army, where he tells her to sit alone in a room at the exact day and time that he says and they’re going to connect telepathically from across the world. He asked her not to hold back any thoughts, no matter how dirty. It’s so beautiful and so Vonnegut.” Another favorite of his are Henry Miller’s letters with Anaïs Nin: “They’re as philosophical as they are erotic,” Starr says. “They’re the gold standard.”
The fact that the very act of writing has begun to feel so out of step with contemporary life only heightens the sense of intimacy a love letter can convey: “Letters are so out of time and antiquated, there’s no real reason to send them anymore—so it means a lot to receive one,” Starr says. “The fact that you’re taking the time and going through the trouble to send one says so much about how you feel towards someone.” (Doubly sweet is the gorgeous calligraphy of Valentino’s in-store scribes, who can customize their handwriting to your liking.)
This collaboration is only the start of a new partnership, which will continue with events in the spring. Until then, make your way to Valentino on Paris’s Avenue Montaigne, Milan’s Santo Spirito, Rome’s Piazza di Spagna, London’s Sloane Street, or New York’s Madison Avenue by end of day on the 14th—or, if a Valentino store isn’t within your sights, you can send a special note through the house’s website.
Now, when will we get Alessandro Michele’s love/hate list?
