Clothes to make you go wow – that was Matthieu Blazy’s aim with his Spring/Summer 2025 Bottega Veneta show. And, you know what? It’s better than most people’s aims – which are, often simplistically, clothes to make the cash registers go kerching. By contrast, Blazy wanted to show us something we hadn’t seen before. Which is a noble aim, and one he achieved.
So, there was the set: a sequence of squidgy leather bean bags in a nursery menagerie of various animal forms, that weren’t just decorative but served a serious function – they slumped us down, so we were staring up at the models. Other designers have done that before – Yves Saint Laurent raised his couture models on a catwalk for the first time in 1976 for his Ballets Russes collection, transforming his clothes into a show and placing his women on a pedestal. But the intention here was for us to see these figures from a child’s-eye perspective, distorting their proportion accordingly. Details were enlarged – a giant lapel, hulking great David-Byrne-in-Talking-Heads shoulders, a childish backpack in pink was blown up to, roughly the size of a coffee table to dwarf the model toting it. All of them made it seem as if a kid had stolen clothes from their parents and tried them on for size – all recreated on a six-foot-something model, of course. And the latter accessory was, of course, made of intrecciato leather.
That is something Blazy does a bunch, ever since his first Bottega Veneta collection – creating things that look like other things, clothes that you need to get ahold of and fondle and turn inside out just to figure what the damn things are made out of, and even then sometimes it’s tricky. Here, there was a sense of the humdrum being sublimated: there were bodega-cum-Bottega shopping bags recreated with embroideries, bunches of petrol-station flowers crafted from crochet, humble brown paper bags made from buttery-soft leather. “The adventure of the everyday” is how he termed it, and then let animals scramble freely in adventure around the clothes, rabbits printed on pieces and frogs as brooches. “What would the kid in you want?” was a question Blazy asked himself, and produced clothes with a sweetness, an innocence and, as ever, a degree of impossibility.
Of course, that impossibility comes from the handwork in these pieces. I spoke to Blazy earlier this year after his equally stellar Autumn/Winter show. Them he told me: “From day one, actually, when I started at Bottega, I was like, ‘You know what? We have a technology, we have craft, which is our technology, it's timeless. Why don’t we just start from there?’” Here, there was hidden craft, a true wow factor when you get your hands on this stuff: a sequin dress that is actually laser-cut leather, a tropical weight merino wool woven to resemble stonewashed denim, a flannel shirt in a heavy cotton, cut with a bold curve that nips the waist as precisely as any mid-century couture by Dior or Balenciaga. It seemed normal at first, but encouraged you to look again.
How often do you do that at a fashion show, really? How often are you grabbed, tugged in close, intrigued, excited. How often do you really say wow? At Bottega, these days, quite a lot.