Bottega Veneta Puts Julianne Moore in an Alpine Disco for They Dance Too, After Beau Travail

Bottega Veneta's end-of-year campaign is called They Dance Too, and it puts Julianne Moore in a disco in the mountains. The house's page for it says Moore is the life of the party inside a mysterious disco in an alpine landscape, dancing to Corona's "The Rhythm of the Night" in homage to the finale of Claire Denis's 1999 film Beau Travail. Dancer Léo Walk joins her, with models Amelie Loblich, Anine van Velzen, Gertrud Rose, Leon Dame, Lina Zhang and Mubarak Oyewola. Drew Vickers shot the stills and Stephen Kidd made the films.

Bottega let it out in pieces. On Thursday, November 5, its Instagram posted three short films, Trail-running, Gate-crashing and Living, each set to the Corona track, and on Friday it posted the main cut, The Rhythm of the Night, with Moore, Walk, Lina Zhang and Leon Dame. The campaign page went up with them, framing the whole thing as Louise Trotter's take on the end of the year and on the moment between 2026 and 2027.

Why Beau Travail

The reference is a specific one. Beau Travail is Denis's adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, following a section of French Foreign Legion soldiers training in Djibouti, and in its final scene Denis Lavant's Galoup dances to "The Rhythm of the Night" in the Djibouti nightclub he used to go to. Bottega moves that dance from a nightclub to snow and ice: the stills put Moore against the walls of an ice cave, and the films' cover frames are snow and ice.

The house also plays on the title. Beau travail means good work, and Bottega's page turns it into the theme: the collective joy of recognising what's been achieved while moving freely towards the future, with each dancer bringing their own rhythm to a shared new beginning. For a house whose whole pitch is craft and the people who make things, it's a neat way to say thank you for the year without saying it.

Our read

Bottega came back to Instagram at the end of October with a feed of its own archive, and this is the first new film it has put there since, built for the feed: three short teasers on one day, the main film the next, then the page. It also shows what Trotter's Bottega looks like outside the runway. Her Spring 2027 show had Moore in the front row; here Moore wears an oversized dark suit and a white shirt, and the clothes stay in the background of the dancing. What the campaign doesn't do is sell much: Bottega's page names no collection and shows no prices, and the one product it links is the Knot bag Moore holds in the first still, so it's a mood for the season rather than a product launch.