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.”
There have been torrid romance-sparking, revolution-starting, bed-rumpling love letters throughout time; dispatches signed, sealed, and delivered straight from the heart.
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 on? “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.”
