Bottega Veneta’s SS24 show opened with a vintage-style knitted bathing suit and a giant woven beach bag (leather, obviously) containing the opening look from the previous collection, almost to suggest the model had shed her clothes to go on holiday and get away from it all. “But she’s not going to the beach to lay down,” the house’s creative director Matthieu Blazy explained after the show. This was a show about travel, for sure, but not the kind of jet-set vacationing that usually occupies designers’ minds. This was an intrepid odyssey of the world beyond Mediterranean hotspots, to continents and cultures beyond the status quo, in search of transformation and self-discovery, perhaps even beauty. “Are they looking for themselves? Are they looking for hope? A new world of possibilities, where they can find a new kind of rhythm?” Matthew asked.
What followed was a pair of artfully sculpted black suits — roped shoulders, wide lapels, worn with elongated wide-leg trousers – all of which suggested the everyday hustle, the coded uniforms of 9-to-5ers. Were these characters returning to work on the first day of September, following a summer on the coast? Were they city dwellers dreaming of somewhere exotic, only to wake up and get dressed for work? Matthieu said that the starting point for the collection was Corn Flakes. Yes, really. He has been feeling nostalgic for childhood memories of sitting at the breakfast table and surveying the world maps on the back of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes. “It made us dream of exploring new places,” he reminisced. “Somehow you would travel, even at home eating cereal.”
And so, in 72 looks, he took us around the world with a collection that offered a culture-clashing odyssey. “The idea was blending worlds. We took inspiration literally from all around the world: South America, Southeast Asia, Russia, Brittany, Sicily… we tried to blend them to create some kind of new culture,” he enthused. “We looked at different cultures and the way people dress, and we try to create not a new wardrobe, but a new proposal of different inspirations of the world, never trying to be literal.”
The result was a collection, dislocated from any specific country or region, outward-looking at a time when not only are designers inwardly self-referencing their own archives, but many are also hesitant to draw from beyond the canon of Eurocentric fashion for fear of being labelled as culture vultures by keyboard critics. But who doesn’t want to travel to faraway places, especially at a time when travel is becoming more politically and logistically fraught? And who doesn’t want clothes to transport you to who you want to be, offering escapism from the banality of everyday life?
You may remember that last season, Matthieu declared his AW23 collection the end of an Italian trilogy, inspired by Futurism and mid-century cinema. And so, this collection was a symbolic line in the sand, his previous collections stuffed into the giant woven bags carried by models as if to suggest that Matthieu was moving on from the codes he has already established: the leather jeans, tank tops, and flannel shirts, all of which have since cropped up on catwalks elsewhere. Instead, he was in the mood for adventure, both ideologically and sartorially: colour, texture, pattern, and most importantly, the apotheosis of craft.
However, to describe the craftsmanship of the clothes on display would be like trying to figure out the recipes for a three Michelin-starred tasting menu. There were sculpted leather dresses, psychedelically vibrant knitwear, silk tassels bouncing around the body, multi-coloured stripes of leather patchworked on the bias, sways of fringe swaying from skirts and coats, giant knots of leather in lieu of seams, trippy jacquard gowns, dresses with jutting curves whirling around the body like rock formations, woven gowns with giant raffia pom-poms exploding all over them, suits with sparkling pinstripes going in every direction, shoes made of leather banana leaves and international newspapers morphing into foulard bags. It was a feast for the eyes, an invitation to turn the act of getting dressed into a journey.
All of this is a testament to the fact that Bottega Veneta does craft like no other house, each piece a result of technical wizardry, more inventive than most Parisian couture houses. You can only guess how much development and work went into this collection, but the point is not that craft is used to justify the price of a handbag, as it so often is elsewhere, but rather provides a roadmap for design innovation, which is a journey for any designer or artisan. Nothing about this was homespun, just in the same way that cooking a Michelin-starred dish at home is impossible.
This is fashion that squares the circle by being non-disposable – of the moment yet timeless, exotic in the truest sense of the word: otherworldly and unfamiliar. Clothes that act as a passport to the deeper internal destination that fashion should always act as a method of transport to: a personal expression of style. “You know, it’s really about this idea, a bit like Balzac, of building people and trying to work on individuality,” Matthieu reflected, and indeed, the result of his intrepid curiosity has transformed Bottega Veneta itself into one of the most individual forces in fashion today.
