Taste. Bottega Veneta Resort 2025

November 2, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Matthieu Blazy brings something growingly rare in fashion today: clothes that spark not just joy, but happiness. His recent collections for Bottega Veneta ooze with unabashed dolce vita; they make you want to live life colorfully and boldly. This is also the case with resort 2025 line-up, which is beautifully eclectic and full of playful idiosyncrasy. “There was no big concept,” Blazy said of this pre-season collection. “It was more about: How can we put things together and when it comes to the individual ingredients, does it make your heart beat?” That might be the exact answer why Bottega – of all the Kering brands – performs so well. It makes the customers’ hearts beat. When I visited the brand’s newly-refurbished store on Avenue Montaigne in Paris last month, I was more than pleased with the actual emotions the brand’s garments and accessories bring, but also with their non-conformity and exquisite craftsmanship. The resort collection captures that perfectly – and feels like a delightful menu of unpretentious, wholesome meals that please all the taste buds. The food affiliation isn’t a co-incidence. “I rewatched a lot of Anthony Bourdain. There are a lot of parallels between the pleasure of cooking and the pleasure of putting things together on the silhouette. What I really wanted to do this season, it was pure pragmatically epicurean. I just took everything I like. It was like in Italy, when the ingredients are good, you don’t need to do too much with it,” Blazy summed up. How that translates to the clothes? Head-to-toe, saturated colors; experimental intrecciato patterns; extremes of full silhouettes; fish-prints (inspired with the late Gaetano Pesce’s art); massive, artisan knitwear. And plenty of individual taste.

Spice up your wardrobe with a couple of Bottega ingredients…

ED’s SELECTION:

Bottega Veneta Canalazzo Striped Intrecciato Leather Pumps

Bottega Veneta Large Fin Gold Vermeil And Enamel Earrings

Bottega Veneta Striped Knitted Wool Sweater

Bottega Veneta Paneled Cotton Midi Skirt

Bottega Veneta Embellished Ruffled Draped Two-tone Crepe Top

Bottega Veneta Resin And Gold-tone Earrings

Bottega Veneta Intrecciato Leather Gloves

Bottega Veneta Lauren 1980 Maxi Intrecciato Leather Clutch

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Idea of Wow. Bottega Veneta SS25

September 23, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Bottega Veneta show was livid. It made you love living life! Matthieu Blazy really starts feeling the Italian air and flair of dolce vita. His spring-summer 2025 was a joyous, vibrant finale of Milan Fashion Week – and a reminder to let your inner child out from time to time. “I was interested in the idea of wow, the wonder you have as a kid when you try something – it’s almost like primal fashion, your first experience of fashion when you try your parents’ clothes,” the designer said. He showed too-big jackets and one-leg pants under asymmetrical wrap skirts, and pieces like a black tank dress and khaki and navy shirtdresses with built-in wrinkles like they’d been crushed at the bottom of a trunk waiting for a game of dress-up. The details were pure fun: frogs perching at the neckline of a dress and clinging to the heels of shoes, lapels in the shape of bunnies on leather coats, a scarf top printed with giant fish. Humor was all over the spiky wigs and flower bouquets made out of leather (of course, it’s Bottega!). Blazy’s enthusiasm is perceptible and catching. This is exactly what we need in 2024.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Stimulating. Bottega Veneta Pre-fall 2024

May 3, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

Bottega Veneta has released a stunningly stimulating, pre-fall 2024 collection. It’s so evident that Matthieu Blazy found his groove at the brand: his last runway shows are delightful to the senses. But it’s the pre-collections that really validate whether a designer has formed their vocabulary for a house, and Blazy definitely knows what his direction is. While other brands try to propose total looks and stay in one aesthetic lane, the Belgian designer rather pursuits the idea of style that’s diverse and truly authentic. Bottega Veneta isn’t a brand that intentionally creates Instagrammable products – even though social media is increasingly raving about Blazy’s take on the brand. People are catching up with his celebration of humanity which is conveyed in the striking artisanship Bottega stands for.

For pre-fall, “the initial talk I had with the team was what would’ve been the ready-to-wear of Bottega when they started to make the bags in the late ’60s and ’70s. Of course, the idea was almost to work on something anachronic – we don’t want to go too literal, it was the idea of a modern time traveler.” The development process involved lots of photo research, including in old Interview magazines – “Andy Warhol loved Bottega,” he explained – to see “how people layered and mixed and matched.” It led to results like the suede skirt layered over suede pants, and the trim crewneck and striped collar shirt tucked belted gray jeans. The spirit he was channeling was “bourgeois, but decontracté,” he suggested, pointing to a checked button-down worn with a leather bomber and a khaki twill pencil skirt, and another checked button-down with a full skirt. There is much more to restlessly drool over in this lookbook: the pastel pant suits, the colorful suede intrecciato separates, the homoerotic-coded bandana bag, and a vibrant horizontally striped knit dress with the nubby pile of a carpet. Each piece is a wearable, meaningful artwork – that might be the ethos of Blazy’s Bottega Veneta.

Need a Bottega wardrobe fix?

ED’s SELECTION:

Jodie Mini Knotted Leather And Shearling Tote

Printed Leather Straight-leg Pants

Canalazzo Striped Intrecciato Leather Pumps

Printed Denim Shirt

Layered Cotton-blend Poplin And Bouclé Shirt

Small Solstice Shoulder Bag

Jacquard Feather Midi Skirt

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Sprezzatura. Bottega Veneta AW24

February 26, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy delivered his best collection to date. The reason the autumn-winter 2024 show felt this good was not only because Blazy found a way to make his love for artisan detail finally look light and spontaneous, sprezzatura-way. The Bottega Veneta line-up delivered a sense of authentic style, a true rarity to observe during fashion month. That might have come to Blazy with a change in his creative mindset. “The initial idea was to reduce the collection to almost the function of clothes – only reduce not to the minimum, but to a maximum. I was interested in making a monument out of the everyday.” It started with the first look, a couture-ish black cocoon coat whose rounded, three-dimensional silhouette was the result of the folding in of its sides and sleeves, which were secured with big brass buttons. Unfasten them and the coat becomes more or less flat. The nonchalant, unstudied result is stunning. This season’s clothes are refreshingly stripped back: gone were the embroideries and embellishments that defined last season’s collection, but there was no shortage of impressive workmanship. Blazy said, “I wanted the technique to be in the fabric itself.” A fine example of that was the “memory” prints made from layer upon layer of passport stamps that he used for a trio of willowy looks with swooping tiers on their skirts. As we see 2024 fashion unveil, there’s a strong flux of “everyday” clothes; amid all the crises, the understandable tendency among design houses and their executives is to play it safe. As we’ve seen so far this season, that can lead to same-y fashion, indistinguishable from one runway to the next. Blazy is immune to that risk.

A couple of my favorite artisan masterworks coming from Blazy’s Bottega…

ED’s DISPATCH:

Strapless Paneled Leather Midi Dress

Rocket Leather Wedge Mules

Woven Leather & Cashmere Gloves

Small Intrecciato Leather Bucket Bag

Oversize Stretch Wool Coat

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Welcome To My Island. Bottega Veneta Resort 2024

November 3, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s been a great week for fashion: we had Phoebe Philo’s big Monday debut, and on Friday a delightful Bottega Veneta resort 2024 collection by Matthieu Blazy. “It’s not about the total look,” the designer summed up the brilliant line-up. “With the team,” he explained, “we talked a lot about what makes individuals special, the pieces they wear and the pieces that tell a story – the pieces, sometimes, that are a bit off, something that feels very personal, what makes you different from others.” What inspired the exercise, Blazy explained, was a trip home to his parents’ place, where he found himself going through his childhood wardrobe. A crab print dress of his sister’s made an impression, as did the “incredible labels” and slightly off proportions of his own old clothes. The crab print dress has been reimagined here as a sweater and matching skirt handknit in shades of turquoise and coral; on an ivory sweater in the same vein a scaly snake twists around the torso, its forked tongue flicking red. As for the oversize label stitched to the back of a tailored vest, it is indeed likely to conjure youthful memories for all who sees it. Blazy’s instinct to create serious fashion out of unserious items feels of a piece with what he’s done on his runways, making jeans, tank tops, and flannel shirts out of the finest leather and in the process turning mundane garments into collector’s items. There is also a dress here whose print features a dancing marionette. The Commedia dell’Arte was another reference this season; Blazy saw parallels between the harlequin costumes of its performers and Bottega Veneta’s own intrecciato motif. A leather coat in mint, burgundy, and white, and a bright yellow and black woven button-down and matching pants are showcases for the label’s striking artisanship and the design team’s embrace of fun. On that note, a large intrecciato tote was constructed with an irregular weave that called to mind TV static or broken pixels. Definitely not just another it-bag, but a wearable artwork to cherish.

As the festive season is slowly but steadily approaching, how about some of Blazy’s Bottega on the wishlist?

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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