Bottega’s Child’s Play for a Sophisticated Mind

Today’s best designers believe a 15-minute fashion show should be a transcendent experience. Like watching a great movie, it should lift you and leave you with a profound feeling. The material might be the peculiarities of contemporary culture — above all, the way it stresses individualism and identity. That was the idea behind the Prada show: Every model was not merely a unique person, with a different look and attitude, but also a “superhero,” according to Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. You felt her authority without being threatened by it, in contrast to the strong, highly sexual vision of the 1990s — Madonna in Gaultier — that now strikes us as one-dimensional.

For Matthieu Blazy, the creative director of Bottega Veneta, the material was time and the tone of expression was sincerity. When a designer can impart a sense of sincerity, as Francesco Risso did at Marni earlier in the Milan collections and as John Galliano did so movingly in his Margiela couture show in January (it’s the subject of a film to be aired next week in Paris), then he or she has already won over the audience. And if they can deal tenderly with feelings of time and home (or forcefully, in the case of Demna’s 2022 “snow” show for Balenciaga that dealt with displacement), then they are a level up. We are sick of slick — that is, shows that are little more than an opportunity to sell accessories and heritage with only a token of newness. Milan was full of such shows this season, including a flagging Ferragamo on Saturday.

Bottega Veneta
Photo: Courtesy of Bottega Veneta

Blazy began working on this collection a year ago while putting together his fall 2024 show. What the two collections have in common is a classical sense of allure, and though the craft techniques in both are impressive, they don’t jump out at you, as they once did too often in Blazy’s work for Bottega. For spring, he wanted to consider the idea of wonder. “The opposite of disillusionment,” he told me the day before the show.

We were looking at dozens of images on an inspiration board — photos of the dapper Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, Tom Hanks in Big, a still of Little Edie Beale from Grey Gardens, a color illustration from Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, and the famous scene in which E.T. blends in with the children’s stuffed animals. Nearby was one of the poufs that Blazy would use for the seating, the original Zanotta Sacco but now in leather as a rabbit. There would be other critters, too.

But, he added, referring to the collection, “It’s not about childhood.”

Bottega Veneta
Photo: Courtesy of Bottega Veneta

Knowing in advance that he was after a sense of wonder, I was curious how he would pull that off. Would I feel it? And how would that sensation connect to the experience of wearing clothes, something Demna also talked about at the recent Paris couture?

Well, I did feel it about midway into the fast-paced show. A number of factors were at play. First, as Blazy planned, the animal poufs put the front-row guests low to the floor, forcing us to look up at the models and thus putting us in a vulnerable position. Second, the soundtrack helped to build up a momentum that used humor and nostalgia. It included a clip from Wall-E, Hanson’s “MMMBop,” James Blake’s “When We’re Older,” and the stirring “Elegy for Dunkirk,” from the 2007 movie Atonement.

Bottega Veneta
Photo: Courtesy of Bottega Veneta

Additionally, there were thoughtful gestures of everyday urban life, like the slightly crushed supermarket bouquets (made entirely of leather) that several models clutched with their purses. It also helped that some cast members looked like archetypes — the older dad (Larry Scott, for example, who used to model for Giorgio Armani back in the day), or the sweet, redheaded “girl next door” in her baggy and faded plaid shirt, or a boy who looked a bit like a young Tom Hanks. I think I was hooked about the time a young woman with a thick head of dark brown hair came out in a short white skirt and a navy shirt with the contrast of a very oversize men’s tailored jacket in gray, its 1940s style playing lightly on the image of kids in their grandpa’s suits. Yet the woman looked marvelous.

Bottega Veneta
Photo: Courtesy of Bottega Veneta

The wonder was ultimately in how Blazy and his team conceived and styled the clothes, with many of the looks and gestures corresponding to a feeling we relate to moments in our lives and thus the passage of time. There were men’s sweaters with the details of matchsticks (“Don’t play with fire” or “Let’s sneak off and smoke”) and a black knit dress adorned with metal matchsticks. The colors of one woman’s suit — burgundy jacket, cinnamon-brown shirt, poppy trousers — seemed to duplicate the tones of early Disney animation.

Meanwhile, an austere, simple-looking black leather dress appeared to be coated in sequin. Actually, the “sequins” were integral to the leather; they were cut with a very fine laser. Touch the dress, and it feels as smooth as a seal skin.

More ingeniously, perhaps, Blazy incorporated a sense of fashion time in many of the clothes, like a heavy striped cotton shirt-jacket that kind of evoked the shape of Christian Dior’s Bar jacket and pair of flat, crushed-looking, knitted women’s suits worn with thin white T-shirts that made me think 1960s ladylike attire. The men’s fashion was equally strong, and one of the outstanding garments in the whole show was a pair of draped trousers that look like stonewashed jeans. In fact, they were made of tropical-weight wool, and they took a year of development.

“You know what Armani brought to fashion,” Blazy said. “Well, I think because we had Armani, somehow the world of draped, chic clothes stayed in fashion. I don’t think it would have continued without him.”

Bottega Veneta
Photo: Courtesy of Bottega Veneta

Not only is the observation astute, but it’s also generous. Fashion has long expressed a sense of wonder, the wonder of an age — the emancipation of women in the 1920s; the liberation of Europe in the Second World War with Dior’s New Look; the social and political movements of the ’60s, which Saint Laurent and other designers tuned into. There was so much empathy in the Bottega show, just as there was in Galliano’s January show, which drew on the work of mostly 1930s photographers looking at real people in the streets and bars. Those faces stared back at Galliano, and he transmitted that sense to us in the audience.

Blazy also placed himself in a timeline of human experience and managed, as well, to deliver the goods: the new bags, shoes, and clothing that will sit on their own in shops next spring.

Ferragamo
Photo: Courtesy of Ferragamo

The wonders at Ferragamo were thong stilettos with pink satin ribbons tied up the ankles. Does any woman, besides a ballerina, want to bother with silk ribbons? Although the bags in Max Davis’s collection looked fine, as did many of the men’s clothes, there were missteps on the women’s side, notably the deconstructed trench-coat dresses — a style done many times by other brands— and the oversize cargo-pant suits with popped collars, a look now identified with Phoebe Philo. Some dresses — soft cocoon shapes and others in molded leather — were nice, but the image of Ferragamo’s ready-to-wear style is elusive.

Ferragamo
Photo: Courtesy of Ferragamo

Ferragamo
Photo: Courtesy of Ferragamo

Diesel
Photo: Courtesy of Diesel

Glenn Martens, as usual, put on a strange and technically brilliant show for Diesel. It was strange in the sense that the floor of the hangar-size venue was thickly covered with scraps of denim, which to me looked vaguely and appropriately dystopian. It was a reminder of how much we consume. Some of the more dazzling denim pieces looked velvety or like plush piles of trim on jackets, but just as captivating were printed shirts that had been pleated, coated with material, and then cracked. And the sexy, twisty scarf dresses that closed the show were made of one piece of fabric.

As the ever-innovative Martens said, “I want the girls to be able to sit on the ground.”

Diesel
Photo: Courtesy of Diesel