Bottega Veneta (Q979)
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Italian fashion company
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Bottega Veneta |
Italian fashion company |
Statements
2025
creative director
2000
presented collection
The childlike sense of wonder that Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy was talking about backstage at his spring 2025 show had its early stirrings with this resort collection, which precedes it in stores by several months. The intrecciato version of Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever, which caused a stir on social media at the brand’s spring re-sees, makes an appearance here. Having listened to him wax nostalgic about 1980s films likeE.T.andSplashin Milan, the mermaid perched on a rock on an embroidered aloha shirt now looks like an obvious reference to the Daryl Hannah movie. And there’s another top decorated with naive drawings of a chessboard, a hand of cards, and a magic 8 ball, among other playthings, that has the “personal touch” feeling that doesn’t really factor in much other luxury fashion today. The fish-print scarf dress is an homage to Gaetano Pesce, the artist and a Blazy collaborator, who died in April.“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?”Bottega Veneta was a “bright spot” for Kering in the third quarter. Not being an analyst, I’d reckon that its success is down at least in part to that personal touch. It extends to this season’s bag offering, which in addition to new versions of its heart-quickening Sardine bag, includes a tote depicting a Venetian gondola and the Rialto bridge, and a hobo bag made from heavy silk twill scarves. Among the many different shoes, the most playful is a pair of heeled sandals with an apple bauble perched between the toes.Elaborating on his approach, Blazy said, “I read a lot of books about elegance, about how to style yourself. And at the same time 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.”Only where Italian cuisine revolves around a few key ingredients, this Bottega Veneta collection ranged.
Originality trumped consistency, though there were a few through-lines, like neckties for both men and women; head-to-toe color; experimental intrecciato patterns including one involving newsprint, and extremes of silhouette, from full New Look-ish skirts to minis, a first for Blazy here. Quoting from G. Bruce Boyer’s book,True Style, he said, “elegance is a dialogue between innovation, tradition, and individual taste.” If there’s one look that summed it all up, it was the guy in a shirt, tie, and long knit polo dress, with the Gaetano-fish scarf tossed over his shoulder, and the Rialto bridge tote in his hand.
31 October 2024
Matthieu Blazy sure knows how to set a scene. The animal beanbag chairs—Michelle Yeoh on a ladybug, Kendall Jenner on a horse, Jacob Elordi, the new face of the brand, on a bunny—put the Bottega Veneta crowd in a buoyant mood tonight. It was like we were all kids again in a rec room, knees tucked under our chins, eager to watch our favorite show on TV.In his two and a half years at the label, Blazy has turned Bottega Veneta into the show of Milan Fashion Week. There’s the art- and design-world adjacencies—the arkful of leather beanbags were designed by Zanotta Sacco, and some of them will be available for sale on the company’s website tomorrow. And there’s the well-curated crowd—this season’s included the trans TikTok star Jools “Very Demure” Lebron and Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer and Olympian whose gender was questioned by the cyberbully Elon Musk: “Very cool move for them,” as my colleague texted from New York. But in the end, it’s Blazy’s clothes that put him in the league of designers that matter most. He’s the rare guy who can marry the conceptual with the coolly everyday.The concept this season was childhood. “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,” he 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 animal chairs were inspired by the movieE.T., Blazy explained, the scene where Elliott’s mom opens the closet and somehow misses the extraterrestrial hiding among all the stuffed toys. And that theme carried over to the clothes: 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.If all that sounds unserious, it was, and that’s a risk for a label with deeply serious prices like Bottega’s. Blazy was making a bet that people will share his sense of humor and his heart. It was the right bet to make. In fashion now, especially here in Milan, we’ve seen a lot of playing it safe, of brands in rehash mode or standing in place.
Blazy’s fashion, in contrast, looks free, whether he’s putting the accent on craft (did you get a load of the spiky leather wigs?), elevating essentials like Elliott fromE.T.’s flannel shirt and denim (which were neither flannel nor denim, I don’t think), or embellishing a top and skirt with metal matchsticks, because why not?Then there were the simply, brilliantly chic things, like a vivid orange draped jersey dress and an icy white fringed three-quarter-length sleeve coat, and the unmissable bags, the most unusual being the one-of-a-kinds made with leather vests by students at Bottega Veneta’s school. Blazy’s enthusiasm is perceptible and catching. I think the reason we all left so jazzed is because it gave us back the feeling that propelled many of us into fashion as young people in the first place.Wowis right.
21 September 2024
“In a few words, 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.”Matthieu Blazy’s fall Bottega Veneta show was among the most talked about of the season, admired not just for its transportive set, with its Murano glass cactus sculptures and Le Corbusier stools made from scorched wood—he was moved by our turbulent times to conjure a resilient landscape—but also for the way it elevated essential clothes like the cocooning peacoat in the first look, “making a monument of the everyday,” as he eloquently put it.This pre-fall lineup was developed before the show collection, but it came from the same instincts for the purposeful and utilitarian. The late ’60s and ’70s witnessed the birth of the women’s liberation movement and the democratization of fashion—they’re not unrelated subjects. Blazy, has given the season’s practical items a Bottega Veneta polish, but he made a point of saying, “I wanted to have things a little bit easier, softer; more everyday, less statements.”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 in the photo you see here, 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 (actual cotton, not leather, as he’s done in the past) worn with a leather bomber and a khaki twill pencil skirt, and another checked button-down (this one in nubuck, not cotton) with a full skirt. On the handbag front, he pursued a similar goal, pushing styles that don’t necessarily foreground the famous woven leather strips. A red leather bandana bag is especially cool.There is much more to pore over in this lookbook: the Miami pastel pant suits, the colorful suede intrecciato separates, including a repeat of that skirt-over-pants silhouette, the turquoise and red leopard print pants and matching pumps, and a vibrant horizontally striped knit dress with the nubby pile of a carpet. Blazy just can’t help himself: They’re statement-making, every single one.
2 May 2024
After last season’s round-the-world trip, Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy was backstage tonight talking about the everyday: “It started by looking at the news; in the world we live in, what can we do?” he asked. “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.”Though these were clothes to wear to the office, or out to dinner, or late at night when you walk your dog, thanks to their unique volumes, there was nothing workaday about them.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. Rounded jeweled buttons were used to a similar effect on elegant color-blocked dresses, the placement of the fastenings to one side of the neckline and on the opposite hip, creating asymmetrical drapes. You could imagine Blazy and his team working with muslin and stick pins on a mannequin or a model in the studio and approving of the impromptu, unstudied results they were getting.The clothes were stripped back: Gone were the embroideries and embellishments that defined last season’s collection—“I thought it was better to go real,” said Blazy—but there was no shortage of impressive workmanship. Like the two kinds of fringes—short and spiky, and long and liquid—punctuating the hem of the striking red column (it’s gotta be Oscars-bound, said a New York colleague), or the shredded fil coupe dévoré of a golden yellow long dress that looked like it might have been brushed with sandpaper.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. The show’s subtler “future” prints, which appeared on layerable cotton shirts and sturdy trenches, were lifted from loose-leaf and graph paper.In the industry now, there’s a strong undercurrent of “everyday” clothes; amid all the intersecting 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.
Though they’re “real” and “functional” and “pragmatic,” it’s a mistake to consider his clothes understated. A new addition to the most distinctive accessories offering in the business was a fish-shaped clutch, a cousin of the popular Sardine bag, in a lively, multicolored intrecciato weave.
24 February 2024
“It’s not about the total look.” Even in a fashion moment like this one, when everyone’s talking about “real clothes,” you don’t hear a line like that from most designers, but it’s what Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy said as he launched into a run-through of this pre-spring collection. “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.
3 November 2023
Matthieu Blazy declared last season’s collection the end of his Italian trilogy. Something new was in store for spring 2024, and the first clue came as part of the show invitation. Inside a brown cardboard box was a compass on a leather strap, with a map of the world on its face underneath the needles. We were going on a trip.Though the first model wore an old fashioned one-piece bathing suit and carried a large “straw” bag made from leather intrecciato, this wasn’t a destination collection in the way that fashion knows them. We weren’t seaside at some Italian resort town. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” Blazy put it this way backstage: “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.”It’s a generous, expansive instinct on Blazy’s part, especially considering the many Milanese brands that are busy looking inward at the moment, refreshing their own codes, and even resurrecting specific collections from the pre-internet days before 2000. Bottega Veneta doesn’t have the ready-to-wear history that some of its Italian peers do. If that gives Blazy a certain kind of freedom, he made the most of it here, walking away from the codes he’s established during his own short tenure here, sidelining his faded jeans, tank tops, and flannel shirts, all actually made from leather, in favor of more adventurous pieces.Like the leather wrap poncho topping a leather trench. Like a shaggy salt-and-pepper coat. Like the crocheted raffia dresses with the giant pompom embellishments. At least that’s what I assume they were all made from. This was one instance when you really wanted a run-of-show listing the garments’ textile information and the techniques employed to create them, like a map legend.Getting philosophical, Blazy said, “it’s about what you can become after this journey as well; everything you get from a journey transforms you.” With international calls to end the extraction and use of fossil fuels, including a march in New York City last weekend that drew upwards of 50,000 protestors, global air travel will only get more fraught in the future, and yet we’re all compelled to go somewhere, like the soundtrack said. The earth, after all, is so rich with natural wonders.
Some of them turned up in the designs, like a yellow eyelet sundress with the delicate straps strung with natural pearls; others he recreated, like the sandals whose strappy leather was made to look like banana leaves.Blazy believes in the transportive possibilities of fashion. Wear those “banana leaf” sandals or carry the bag and “you escape.” But you can extract the backstory, and this was still an extraordinary collection, more like couture than ready-to-wear when it comes to the craftsmanship that went into individual pieces, from the cowl neck top and “bias-cut” skirt made from strips of different colored leather to the chunky woven jacquard coat that read almost like fur. “Where people call craft dusty, I think it’s the opposite,” said Blazy. “It’s a world of possibilities.” Agreed.
23 September 2023
A few weeks ago a package arrived from Bottega Veneta. Inside was a trio of books: two dedicated to the summer 2023 collection, and a third which reproduced a scrapbook of Kate Moss images that designer Matthieu Blazy made when he was still a teenager in the late 1990s. “Kate Moss was my first Google Research,” Blazy wrote on its opening page. “This fanzine is a tribute to [her] and the pages of a binder I did back then that defined my coming of age.”All these years later, Moss still oozes a kind of insider cool. Linking your label to hers, as he did when he cast her for his summer show last September, is smart business. Really, though, what the book does effectively is show us that Blazy’s Bottega Veneta is a brand with heart. That doesn’t always come across in the luxury sphere, where things are buffed to such a high polish there’s little room for sentiment, but a Zoom preview in which Blazy talked through a series of pre-fall looks telegraphed the same vibe:“At the end of the day, we had a lot of pleasure just making clothes that we want to wear ourselves,” he said. “But it’s not just me. It’s the studio, and it’s the woman who works on fabric.” As it has been from his start at Bottega Veneta, material is a major preoccupation. The boxy t-shirt and denim pencil skirt pictured in the first photo are actually leather, but additionally the leather button-downs that have fast become brand icons have also been made in silk so they’re wearable year-round.Blazy said the development of the collection was a reaction to what he sees as a preponderance of heavy fabrics in the market. “To build up volume, it’s easy to take a heavy fabric and sculpt; we did the opposite, we tried to lighten everything in order for people to move and not be constrained at all.” That came across most clearly in a pair of special dresses, one with volume at the hips created by exposed fabric knots, and another with slits cut into puffy sleeves that draped from high shoulders.That quest for lightness doesn’t mean the clothes lacked indulgences. A bronze sequin coat is bound to feel as good to the touch as it is attractive to gaze upon. Same for a lilac crushed velvet dress with a cool zippered neckline. The ultimate indulgence may be the leather jeans woven in the house intreccio style; this season they come in a silver chrome. They’re trophies of a kind. Other Bottega Veneta customers might be tempted by the cozy hand knits, one of of which features Blazy’s dog John John.
Heart on sleeve.
17 May 2023
Well, that was a knock-out! Matthieu Blazy has done it three times in a row now at Bottega Veneta—wowed us with a collection that simultaneously ups the fashion ante while also delivering real-life relatability. Just how rare a feat that is was demonstrated by the texts that started coming in as we waited for a chance to speak to the designer: “Every single look perfect.” “The variety!” “Not a second of ennui.”Blazy has launched himself to the very top of fashion in a very short amount of time. Backstage he seemed overwhelmed, but utterly prepared, explaining that his inclination this season was to start with the street, and “the idea of the strange encounter—people that you meet in the street and they really amaze you. It’s a place where everyone belongs,” like a parade, or Carnevale, “where there is absolutely no hierarchy.”The Boccioni statue and the Roman bronzes loaned from museums for the show were “part of the parade,” Blazy explained. “The idea was to reconnect Italy through its history. The debate we have with the team is the idea of positive nationalism, that you can reappropriate your history in a very positive way.”By this point in the season, fashion has usually settled into a rhythm. These 81 looks adhered to no developing trends because together they were all different. There’s security in a single message show, but Blazy and the team “decided not to edit the collection.” Instead, they kept adding characters and occasions for which to dress them, starting with a just-stepped-out-of-bed sheer dressing gown and house shoes. What does a Bottega Veneta house shoe look like? It’s a slipper sock, only the wool upper is not wool at all but knitted leather.The breakthrough leather tank top and leather jeans of Blazy’s season one bookended the show. In between, we saw layered dresses with sweet flower embroideries that called to mind luxury long johns, deconstructed 1950s screen star dresses, and an exceptional LBD with a swooping neckline and a front slit not quite high enough to reveal the top of over-the-knee intrecciato boots. Another footwear option that attracted notice were the bulbous jelly pumps.Materials-wise, Blazy was after light, unconstrained fabrics. He said they shaved leather to make it more weightless, and that a showstopper of a fringed coat wasn’t embroidered, as might be expected, but woven in one piece. The silhouettes sometimes went to extremes.
‘Rolled’ waistband skirts were meant to conjure the fishtail bottom half of mermaids, fantastic creatures being part of Carnevale festivities. But there were also cleanly tailored double-layer coats and jackets for women and men.We could go on and on about the aesthetics of Blazy’s Bottega Veneta. But it’s worth talking about the generosity of his instincts, and the inclusivity. In what has to be one of the most genuine, least pretentious comments ever uttered backstage, he said, “I always look at how women and men here layer. It’s very sophisticated, even when it doesn’t work, you know? It’s so personal.” Officially, this show marked the end of his Italian trilogy. Where to next? Blazy’s enthusiasm is contagious. We walked out happier than when we went in, 100% ennui free.
25 February 2023
Matthieu Blazy presented this pre-spring collection virtually back in June. He was just a few months off his Bottega Veneta debut—the debut of the year, we can say from this vantage point—and he was riding the high of positive reviews, but had not yet had the satisfaction of seeing his first season in the stores.“After the show, we sat as a team and we talked,” he explained. “We wondered, what do we want to wear ourselves? How can we make clothes that are cool and at the same time the ultimate luxury? It’s no big concept,” he continued. “It was really the idea of making beautiful clothes thatwewant to wear. At the end it’s about looking cool and looking beautiful.”That resonates with the conversations Blazy’s two runway shows have generated. Again and again, among editor and buyer acquaintances, the refrain has been “that is exactly how I want to look.” Blazy has managed the elusive trick of producing desire, not by over-designing or over-complicating, as often happens in high fashion, but by believing in simplicity.Of course, Bottega Veneta’s is a deceptive simplicity. Not unlike Kate Moss’s printed flannel on the spring 2023 runway, the plaid of a topcoat here is actually printed on nappa leather in an eight-step process. Meanwhile, the jeans that Emma Balfour wears in the opening look are leather intreccio—woven like the label’s bags. The collection also includes jean-jeans, as in denim, cut with the swooshy, higher-in-the-back hem that Blazy used for the statement-making trousers of his debut. They’re bound to be a hit, not least of all because of their comparably easy price point.Silhouette is one of Blazy’s key preoccupations. On that June Zoom he was keen to point out the jacket shoulder proportions of a button-down in pinstriped cool wool, and the mid-century shape of a skirt structured to blossom at the hips. His interest in unexpected forms extends to handbags. The helmet-shaped satchel that appears in slide 5 is inspired by the headgear of Milan’s scooter commuters and is another fun result of the team’s elevation of the everyday. The Foulard bag (in slide 41) is “like wearing a bandana on your shoulder,” Blazy laughed.“It was quite a playful exercise,” he said of the work the team did this season. “It felt quite free.” At the same time, Blazy is slowly, steadily crafting his Bottega Veneta language.
The brass finish hardware of the Sardine bag has been incorporated as a jewelry detail on a little black dress, and the metal studs that gave movement to Fortuny pleat skirts for fall appear as trim on a bias silk cocktail dress.
2 November 2022
Matthieu Blazy is the real deal. It can be challenging living up to a sensational debut, but he did that and then some at Bottega Veneta tonight. To start, he set a fabulous scene, enlisting the 82-year-old Italian design pioneer Gaetano Pesce to create a site-specific installation that included a colorful, swirling poured resin floor and 400 unique chairs. As the crowd filled the space, it had the feel of a real scene. Cicciolina circulated, Erykah Badu posed for pictures, Kirsten Dunst and Kodi Smit-McPhee chatted with friends, and Pesce soaked it all in from the front row.Unique is the operative word here. Backstage, Blazy said, “the collection started with meeting Gaetano. I went a lot to visit him in New York and we had a lot of discussions about diversity. He worked on his side and I worked on mine and we did a juxtaposition. The idea was ‘the world in a small room.’ We went full on,” he continued. “The idea was to represent different characters and put them in the landscape of Gaetano.”In plainer terms, what Blazy seemed to be getting at was the concept of wardrobing. His ambition is not to dress celebrities on the red carpet, though celebrities will surely come. Nor is it to enter the lofty salons of haute couture, though that’s a future possibility too. What Blazy wants to do is dress his clients for every occasion, and aren’t we luckier for it?Picking up the thread from last season, the opening looks, though they looked like denim, flannel, and cotton tees, were all leather. Modeled by Kate Moss herself, a flannel shirt required 12 layers of prints to achieve the depth of color Blazy was after. “It’s this kind of casual comfort and we put it to an extreme and we call it perverse banality,” he said.Blazy also revisited the “dynamic” silhouette he established last season, exaggerating the sense of clothes-in-motion by adding what could be described as fins to the back of pant legs. Similarly, the storm flaps on trench coats seemed to have caught a breeze and stayed there. The curving funnel necklines on jackets and shirts gave them a streamlined profile. These are subtle details, but if they’re missable by the uninitiated, they matter a lot to fashion obsessives who watch for such changes. Blazy has those people’s attention.This was a highly resolved collection, a reminder in a Milan Fashion Week that included some shaky debuts of the importance of experience.
Blazy has a lot of it, and it showed in all aspects of this show, including in the knit jacquard dresses and separates—“highly technical,” he said, “but the results are not technical, they’re emotional”—and in the trio of fringed finale dresses in colors lifted from Pesce. “It’s a new technique where you weave with fringe integrated into the fabric and they’re all trimmed by hand. That’s also very technical,” he laughed.About those distinctive Pesce chairs—they’ll be sold at Design Miami. We enquired about the price and were quoted low five figures. That’s not officially official, but now you know.
24 September 2022
At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy’s day has come. The 35-year-old Belgian interned at Balenciaga and worked at Raf Simons, Maison Margiela Artisanal, Celine, and Calvin Klein before landing as ready-to-wear design director at Bottega Veneta in 2020. That’s quite a pedigree, but he’s always been a behind-the-scenes guy. Then last November, following Daniel Lee’s abrupt exit, he was named creative director.Lee left the brand when it was on an upward jag, which doesn’t make for the easiest or most obvious of transitions. But there’s no two ways about it, this was a terrific debut: a clean break from the recent past, confident, wide-ranging, and significantly more interesting than these pictures suggest.The white tank top and jeans in look number one and the button-down and jeans of the look that followed? All made from leather. Bottega Veneta started as a handbag business and woven leather intrecciato is the house specialty, but the sublime nubuck of that tank top and jeans was a surprise—and a showcase for the thoughtfulness of the house’s new designer.Backstage in the crush of celebrity well-wishers—Julianne Moore, Jacob Elordi, Neneh Cherry, and Blazy’s former boss Raf Simons, among them—he discussed his approach: “The idea was to bring back energy, a silhouette that really expressed motion, because Bottega is a bag company, so you go somewhere, you don’t stay home. This collection basically is a journey,” he continued. “There’s many characters, they all have places to go, they feel quite free.”Study these pictures and you’ll see what he means: The cropped flares were cut longer in front than in back, suggesting forward motion or speed, and the swooped backs of caban coats had a similar effect. Women will for sure go places in these tailored clothes. Their simplicity and honesty, not to mention their luxury, make them value propositions: identifiable with no expiration date.Where the suiting was executed with precision, Blazy’s knitwear was more eclectic; shrunken patchwork sweaters had the charm of the handmade. The label’s recent success has been down to the It-ness of its bags and shoes. A lot will be riding on Blazy’s new interpretations. With accessories, too, the emphasis was on the artisanal. The new Kalimero bag was woven in one piece with no seams, and the same goes for the thigh-high boots.
It was tempting to see Easter eggs here and there—nods to work Blazy contributed to in the past, be it asymmetric drop waist dresses that evoked Celine or the Leavers lace slip dress in a yellow that called back to the famous slipcovered fur at Calvin. In that way, the collection was also about his journey. There will be many women and men happy to hitch a ride and follow where he goes next.
26 February 2022
Daniel Lee and Bottega Veneta parted company last month, but an object in motion stays in motion. The Italian label, which enjoyed tremendous growth under Lee, is opening a store in New York City’s SoHo later this week, and this pre-spring offering—Wardrobe 03, in house parlance—is what curious shoppers will see at the new Greene Street space.Development-wise, the collection predates the spring outing—Salon 03—that took place in Detroit in October. It’s bright and upbeat, awash with juicy citrus and berry shades, and cut in rich, touchable textures. Not quite hedonistic but close; it’s a wardrobe for good times—at Art Basel, say, or for Barbados Independence Day. Rihanna wore a dress by the brand when she was named a national hero of her native country last month.In place of the directional tailoring that has distinguished preceding collections here, there was denim and corduroy, but done the Bottega Veneta way, meaning that the denim is knitted with jumbo stitching, and the corduroy—jacket, pants,andmatching boots—comes in acid colors. Another no-brainer item that got the house treatment is the puffer; quilted on the bias in glossy orange and Hockney blue leather, it’s no run-of-the-mill jacket.If coming at everyday items with an elevated touch was one part of the Bottega Veneta story under Lee, the other was to emphasize high craftsmanship—to make things at a couture-like level without bending to couture-ish propriety. The hand-crocheted and -beaded dresses here belong to that rubric, even though they’re designed in the bare, easy shapes of beach cover-ups. Likewise, the intarsia shearling bathrobes. A dress underneath one of the robes, in a smaller version of the coat’s interlocking pattern, is cut from classic swimsuit material; together they really do channel the Miami-in-December vibe. Milan in February is where it’s at for this brand, though; that’s when Matthieu Blazy makes his debut as creative director and we’ll get to see where he wants to take this buzzy label.
6 December 2021
Hello, Detroit.Early on in the pandemic, Bottega Veneta announced a new show model: Milan was out, and off-schedule, salon-style shows were in. Creative director Daniel Lee would take his collections on the road and engage with both local talents and local audiences in the cities where the brand posted up. First was London, his home base, last October. A show at Berlin’s Berghain nightclub followed in April. Salon 03 was staged tonight at Detroit’s Michigan Theatre, a 4,000-something-seat movie palace built amid the city’s spectacular automotive-fueled boom in the 1920s that was converted into a parking garage during its even more spectacular 1970s bust.Mary J. Blige and Lil’ Kim were among the stars who jetted in to watch. From New York, a planeful of reporters, magazine editors, and stylists, plus the young designers Peter Do and Hillary Taymour, made the trip too. For many, if not most of them, it was their first time in the Motor City. Curiosity about Detroit, and about what Lee and company could get up to there, were the attractions.Writing inThe Atlanticin 2011, Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out, “Over the past few years, Detroit, the blackest big city in the country, has been hot with reporters and filmmakers who’ve assigned themselves the work of comparing the city’s mythical past against its precarious present.” A decade later, unlike New York or Los Angeles, it’s still the kind of place that has something to prove. Enter Bottega Veneta and Daniel Lee.“I’m obsessed with Detroit,” Lee said after the show. “I first came here six years ago and fell in love with the place. I’m from Leeds; it’s the industrial heartland of the U.K., and Detroit being the industrial heartland of America, I feel this kind of connection.” Then there’s the music thing: “Detroit really is the birthplace of techno, and techno was the music that I was growing up to and going out to. I wanted to use my position to shine a light on all of that.”The day’s events included a culture tour that made stops at the mid-century Hawkins Ferry House in Grosse Pointe; the world’s first and only techno museum, Exhibition 3000; and the studio of furniture designer Chris Schanck, who is among the Detroiters who contributed to Bottega’s three-month pop-up shop at a decommissioned firehouse in the city’s Corktown neighborhood. The techno creatives Moodymann and Carl Craig were responsible for the sonic components of the show.
22 October 2021
Some things we didn’t do in the pandemic: wear 4,000 feathers head-to-toe or a stretch cashmere slip hand knit with 9,500 glass paillettes, pull on a jacket with the pneumatic sheen of a Jeff Koons sculpture, or match our shoes to our bag to our dress. Daniel Lee’s latest for Bottega Veneta is ripe with diversions. The fringed shearling coats that are this collection’s showpieces are cut in the shape of strawberries, or are they cartoon hearts? But there’s whimsy in the more everyday too; the spiral straps of high-heeled sandals were made in coordination with an actual telephone manufacturer. Lee’s clothes and accessories are reminders—lest we forget after months of lockdown and the Delta surge—of the pleasures to be found in dressing up again.For all the fun Lee and co. are having, though, they’re still quite serious about craft. Peer into any one of the It bags he’s unveiled since arriving at the brand circa 2018 and you’ll see that it’s unlined, like all the rest; the signature intrecciato is as finely rendered on the inside as it is on the outside. Preserving savoir faire seems very much top of mind chez Bottega Veneta these days; press notes of the kind often shared by couturiers revealed that the glass dresses here take between 135 and 250 hours to complete. A black and white zebra stripe coat, meanwhile, features 4.3 million stitches on an embroidery machine; it too is left unlined so the workmanship can be appreciated.The surprise of those 4,000 feathers is not their numbers, nor the amount of time it took to embroider them (not fewer than 100 hours), but the garments they were affixed to: the stretch denim that Lee and his team developed for the house and cut into an otherwise traditional jacket and jeans. All of the materials used in this collection were developed in-house. There’s no word on whether the intreccio balloon jacket with the Koonsian sheen would actually float in the next climate calamity, and who would dare risk a fashion trophy like that? But the merging of the fabulous and the functional just might be one of the smartest and most satisfying pandemic after-effects on fashion.
3 September 2021
Bottega Veneta’s is the last major fall 2021 collection we haven’t seen. When the label hosted a salon presentation for it back in April in Berlin, the tiny guest list made an outsize impression online—it took place amid Germany’s lockdowns.This is not that collection. It’s an outing that Bottega Veneta calls “Wardrobe 02,” a preseason lineup of essentials sprinkled with a few of the Daniel Lee–masterminded whimsies that have become collector’s items. Yes, the company will be selling the roller skates that Oumi Janta and Malick Bodian model in these pictures. It’s also a branding exercise, with a look book lineup that includes, in addition to the roller skaters, the musicians Skepta and Neneh Cherry; the dancer Roberto Bolle; artist Mark Leckey; and Central Saint Martins B.A. fashion course leader Sarah Gresty, a friend of Lee’s from his school days. “It’s people who we aspire to see in the clothes,” he said on a phone call. “And there’s big diversity, from music, film, dance, theater, art, skateboarding.”As that roster suggests, and as previous Lee runways have told us, there’s nothing conservative about Bottega Veneta essentials. For Lee and his team, clothing is performance. That’s clear from a look that’s feathered in aqua blue plumes from its high neckline to its pants hem, from an intricately beaded knit BV-green evening dress, and from a giant leather belt that twists around the torso like a helix. But it also goes for straight-world-passing tailoring. The tweed suits are boardroom safe, but they’re definitely not boring.“They’re generic in a way. I like this idea of quite banal everyday clothes” Lee said. “But when you see the fabrics in real life there’s always more to [them]: the tweeds that stretch, the beautiful fabric development, the garments that are constructed without linings. There’s a lot of love and attention in the details, and that we really get off on, honestly.”What you can’t miss is the sense of fun Lee and company are having. His feathery party pants are a guaranteed good time and the clearest signal yet that post-pandemic fashion is going to roar indeed. “The world needs fun now. We want to be provoked,” Lee said. For the curious, “Salon 02,” the Berlin show, is due online in about a month’s time.
8 June 2021
Daniel Lee isn’t a fan of digital fashion shows. That he would prefer something physical comes as no surprise. The defining characteristic of his last collection was its tactility—see Rihanna and Hailey Bieber in the deeply fringed shearling coat. And then there’s the Pouch bag, his first hit at Bottega Veneta, which feels like a luxurious leather pillow clutched under your arm. Anyway, when it came time to decide how to showcase his new collection in this COVID-19 year, he knew he wanted to go against the tide of digital content.Instead, Bottega Veneta is sending out large canvas totes in the distinctive shade of green that Lee has chosen for the brand’s packaging with four separate pieces of content inside. “I think the strength of what we’ve done so far really has been focused on the product and really focused on the physical objects that we’ve made,” Lee said on a phone call last week. “So for me, I kind of started the idea really thinking product first.”Book one is a sort of brand book with inspiration photos of models, fellow designers, and other muses that Lee has been accumulating since his start at the Italian label. PJ Harvey in her early ’90s glory is the centerfold. Book two is a collection of photos by the German conceptual artist Rosemarie Trockel of spring 2021 works in progress. Interspersed among her images are quotes about the importance of clothes signed only with initials. Udo Kier (thanks IMDB.com) discusses the “life-changing” costume he wore inAndy Warhol’s Dracula,but other quotes are more anonymous. Fashion insiders will keep themselves entertained wondering who said what all season.Book three documents a series of salon-style Bottega shows at Sadler’s Wells in London from early October. Guests sat on the stage immersed in light and sound as models wearing Lee’s new collection snaked through the socially distanced chairs. Had the pandemic not prevented it, Lee would’ve liked to take the concept around the world. “It was a bit like going backwards and thinking about how fashion shows began. This idea of salon shows,” he explained. “It felt extremely intimate and much more personal.” The fourth item is a neon green record of Neneh Cherry’s spoken word performance at those shows.
14 December 2020
After a long virtual preview of Bottega Veneta’s new resort collection, two things stood out: Daniel Lee’s obsessive attention to material—be it techy or humble—and his insistence on unusual, avant-garde silhouettes. The two instincts came together in a pair of prodigious trousers with extreme volume through the calves, made from a sturdy fabric that the BV studio lovingly compares to “Dickies cotton.” The pants are exemplary of a collection among the most rousing to emerge from this COVID-19 season. Lee has grasped that the world has changed—is changing—and that the way we’ll want to dress has too. Hence the comfort and familiarity of that cotton and an emphasis on surprisingly homey knits, which represent an evolution of his thinking about all the stretch materials he used on his last runway. But there was no retreat into recuts or the safety of recent successes. “In the darkest moments creativity is so key,” Lee said. “It’s about making clothes you can’t find in other stores. Otherwise what’s the point?”Lee’s exploration of silhouette led him in a couple of different directions. His tailored jackets are sculptural in proportion with those full-legged pants, featuring nipped waists and a V-shaped construction in back that accentuates their shapeliness. (The V—for Veneta—has become a recurring motif, and it’s used to compelling effect as hardware on a new classic bag.) But for all the emphasis on exaggerated volumes, Lee also likes a lean, abbreviated look for women: say, a knitted top and matching fringed above-the-knee straight skirt, or a narrow minidress with one of the portrait necklines he’s made a signature. These leggy pieces have a straightforward sexiness, one that’s likely to be influential as designers and the women they dress search for the new post-crisis. But Lee undercuts the sexiness in these pictures with substantial lug-soled, lace-up boots whose vibe is cool and young.Another thing that won’t go unnoticed about this collection is its searing, gorgeous color. Lee matched a vibrant jade pair of his voluminous new pants with a red tech mesh shirt, adding acid yellow pointy loafers and a chocolate brown bag for good measure. Then there’s the electric lilac hue of an A-line shearling coat, a color that reappears on a knit skirt suit and matching cardigan in what crafting circles would call the popcorn stitch, and the bubble gum pink of patent glove leather pumps with glittery acrylic Louis heels.
He’s of the mind we won’t be wearing all-black this winter, even if our moods don’t match his joyful palette. Fashion, at its most compelling, brings pleasure because it paints a vision of the future that looks fresh and new. If Lee’s playful printed dress in an intrecciato print of naked human bodies and the pouch bag in car seat cover wood beads the model carries with it become souvenirs of this strange lockdown season, it’s because they’re totems of a design team having fun. Who doesn’t want more of that in this moment?
27 July 2020
In between his last show and this one, Bottega Veneta’s Daniel Lee swept London’s Fashion Awards, scooping up four statuettes, more than any designer has ever managed to win in a single year before. Among the prizes were designer of the year and brand of the year. Lee has the industry’s attention, that’s clear. Fashion loves a new guy, and collectively we’ve determined he’s “it.” There was not one but two major profiles of Lee published in the days before this Milan show. Tonight’s collection, his third on the runway, suggests he has the goods to back that up.He definitely has the guts. After scoring his first hit with the Pouch bag, a clutch that shrugged off the house patrimony wovenintrecciatoleather, he did the contrarian thing this season: He embraced theintrecciato. Only hisintrecciatopouches come with a difference. They’re double-face, meaning they’re unlined and the leather strips are double-sided, so the same exceptional workmanship visible on the exterior of the bag is exposed on the interior. It’s the kind of modernizing touch—apparently instinctual but in the end quite thoughtful—that Lee is making his own. Consider another: a high-heeled sandal that curled ergonomically around the ankle and was made on a 3-D printer, BV’s first stab at the process and quite a sexy one.Previewing the accessories at a showroom appointment, Lee extemporized about Bottega Veneta: “When you look at the brand’s beginnings, everything it made was so soft. I find that super inspiring.” That thinking informed the ready-to-wear he put on tonight’s runway. But equally, so did the fact that at 34 Lee is part of the streetwear generation, a cohort that came up wearing Nike trainers and clothes that put an emphasis on cool and comfort. Explaining his approach to fall at BV, he asked, “How do we put ourselves together in a considered, elegant way but still feel comfortable?”His answer was stretch. Even the men’s tailoring was built with stretch in it, he said, so it moves with the wearer. This was the big change from his debut to today. Last February he seemed mostly concerned with the profile cut by a man or a woman in Bottega Veneta. A year later he’s come to understand that the way his clothes feel to the bodies inside them is just as important a selling point. That’s why you’ll see a big emphasis on both knit dressing and jersey, for both day and evening. The other major talking point here was all the fringing.
For one reason or another fringe has been a popular motif in Milan—see also Prada and Jil Sander—but no one has been as audacious on the subject as Lee. His fringed shearlings will be instantly identifiable on the street a year from now, though truth be told, they would have been more powerful if fringe wasn’t already such a collective movement.This was a confident outing, one that leaned into controlled repetition to drive its points home. Lee has quite handily established his Bottega Veneta as the coolest brand in town. He said he’s been spending a lot of time at La Scala watching dance performances; he likes all kinds, from ballet to modern. With the wind at his back at BV, going forward he should give himself freer rein to explore—to let go.
22 February 2020
If someone needed proof of Daniel Lee’s assertive (shall we say gutsy?) approach to Bottega’s reboot, pre-fall was the unapologetic evidence. It further clarified his vision for the Milanese house as not a rehash of pre-existing style codes, but a bold embrace of a stripped-down, modern version of luxury, rooted in refined, high-end craft yet exuding an almost raw feel. There’s a sort of unequivocal honesty about Lee’s approach, which can be as refreshing as it is unsettling—as when a friend tries to be honest with you but ends up hurting your feelings. You don’t know whether to be grateful or angry at him.“Straightforward. Bold and confident. Subtlety elevated,” stated Daniel Lee in the collection’s press notes. ”Pre-fall 2020 celebrates Bottega’s heritage made relevant for today.”Relevantis more often than not a rather tricky adjective. However, the way Lee is manipulating the house’s signifiers is proving successful. His take on the hero intrecciato motif, for instance, is imaginative and ingenious. Here it was blown-up into humongous shapes, padded and inflated into rather fabulous puffa coats, as stylishly extravagant as they looked practical and protective. The shiny, smooth surfaces of nappa leather were dyed deepest black black, or a self-confident palette of turquoise, bubble-gum pink, and lipstick red. The contrast of tactile materials and punchy colors produced a slightly jarring effect.Sporty, workwear-inflected pieces (oversized waterproof leather or nylon parkas, anoraks, and boxy shorts) were designed to appeal to both genders; tailoring was anchored in men’s sartorial finesse, yet treated with fluidity. A black tuxedo, straight-cut with elongated lapels, low buttonholes, and ample palazzo pants was a standout look.Celebrating a certain sensuality seems to be an important expressive concept to Lee. Surely, working for an Italian fashion house brings about a flair for the hedonistic, for some heat, gloss, and lust for life. Yet he isn’t a sensualist, in that he doesn’t indulge in mannerisms or languorous innuendos. There’s nothing fragile or vulnerable in his knotted, twisted yet compact body-con knitted dresses, made in thick, almost coarse ribbed cotton, or in the draped sexy numbers dripping with metallic sequins, shimmering and liquid—yet probably rather cold against the skin.Even if Lee upped the ante on the ready-to-wear offer for pre-fall, the focus on accessories was unwavering.
The collection was anchored by chunky boots with a wavy molded rubber sole, and new versions of the square-toe intrecciato heeled sandals abounded. The most interesting addition was a new take on the hyper-successful series of Pouch bags (the Pouch, the Shoulder Pouch and the BV twist) crafted in a corrugated cardboard “kraft” paper. Made from 100% recycled paper, the raw material is protected and made waterproof with polyurethane film and microfiber fabric. The finish felt incredibly soft and smooth to the touch. Sustainable sensuality could be Bottega’s new frontier.
7 February 2020
Daniel Lee’s Bottega Veneta pouch clutch and distinctive square-toe shoes have become It items almost overnight. In 2019 it can be hard to know what’s an authentic phenomenon and what’s a savvy marketing scheme—i.e., the result of celebrity and influencer seeding—but based on anecdotal evidence, Lee’s new B.V. accessories are legit. Reps from one major department store reported that they can’t keep the pieces in stock. But you know how you can really tell that Lee’s making an impact? The world got its first glimpse of his vision for Bottega Veneta via look book last December, when the brand released its Pre-Fall images, but we’re already seeing other designers taking cues from him.Walking into the Via Senato show space tonight, you could sense the heat around the brand and parent company Kering’s endorsement of Lee. Underneath the Perspex runway an elaborate intrecciato floor had been laid—intrecciato being the house’s proprietary woven-leather motif. And above it guests sat on plump cushions that picked up on the pouch clutch’s pillow-like shape (if that sounds like a little throwaway thing, you try perching on hard metal benches for a month).Lee’s got accessories bona fides, without question, but does he have the ready-to-wear to back it up? Spring marks his second runway outing, and what it tells us is that he’s a designer with conviction—there’s no wavering. He extrapolated on the pieces that worked for Fall, showing many iterations of clingy ribbed-knit dresses with interesting twisting elements and cutouts. Men got sweater versions with similar skin-baring details. And without changing course he reconsidered the items that were less successful. The leather pieces, which ranged from anoraks to all-in-ones to trenches, had a lighter aspect this time around. The women’s tailoring, which was more extreme a season ago, was softened somewhat too.His new ideas coalesced loosely around the notion of sportiness. There were lots of leather basketball shorts for the guys and a couple pairs of knee-length shorts for the girls as well. A pair of monkey-and-pineapple-motif scarf tops, the collection’s one brief foray into print, seemed to come out of nowhere. They didn’t quite gel with the rest of the lineup, but as Lee continues to build and round out his Bottega Veneta, he shouldn’t tamp down on that instinct to experiment. It produced at least one new hit here: the supersized intrecciato hobo bag.
19 September 2019
Absent from the rack at Bottega Veneta’s comprehensive Milan presentation of 70-or-so Pre-Spring men’s and women’s looks—plus bags, shoes, jewelry, shades, and other accessories—was a men’s reverse racerback black rib vest worn above a tailored black pant and beefy black loafer. It was a right, old nipple-flasher. As we searched in vain for the garment (it was en route from the atelier) and contemplated its image this morning, Daniel Lee ventured: “You’ve got to have a bit of humor.” Then he added this aside: “I think there’s a bit of misconception around me as well, that I am super serious because I’m not on Instagram. I just don’t like it [Instagram], but that doesn’t mean I’m serious!”As we moved on to a thin rib-knit sweater in a dense and slightly spongy black cotton that featured a knotted extrusion running from outside the right shoulder into an opening by the left, Lee was asked if there was any other reason for the seriousness misconception. “I guess it’s because of the kind of clothes that I make….and Bottega is a very grown-up house, for sure. And I do think in the market right now there is a space for that which is very relevant. But it is something we can have some fun with, too—just thought-through fun.”Bradford-raised Englishman Lee was made creative director at this most sophisticated but undeniably austere of Italian houses only 11 months ago. Early reactions have been positive where it counts most: ready-to-wear sales have since tripled across all markets and now make up 15% of total revenue. Yet that doesn’t mean that Lee—who seemed relaxed and affable despite the black-suited pin-drop atmosphere of BV’s corporate culture—is afraid to change lanes when the instinct grabs him. He said: “This season…we stepped back and analyzed what had worked so far, what was strong and also where I felt we needed to improve.”Which leads back to that notion of seriousness. Of his last collection, Lee said: “I didn’t think it was so successful when things became too cool and hardened. I don’t think that really reflected me. Bottega Veneta, and Italian culture in general, is something that feels very warm, friendly, and inviting to me.”That this review hands a lot of quote space to Lee reflects that hehasseemed an enigmatic presence since arriving here.
There is that lack of a social-media second life, plus his decision not to speak after his debut runway collection, and the fact that his last gig was at Celine—a pre-BV CV entry that brings its own particularly loaded flavor of scrutiny. Yet during the time not squandered posting Facetuned vacay selfies, Lee has evidently drilled deep to mine some brand-consistent building blocks with which to reconstruct Bottega Veneta his way.
12 June 2019
Daniel Lee’s runway debut was a long time coming; the 32-year-old Céline alum was appointed Bottega Veneta’s new creative director last June. In the interim, Lee presented a Pre-Fall collection in the company’s Milan headquarters that indicated he was well acquainted with the Bottega DNA—it’s a leather specialist with a proprietary intrecciato weave—and that he’s not afraid to blow it up. Literally. Along with a distinctive square-toe pump and boot, the maxiintrecciototes were the pre-collection’s big takeaway: distinctive and identifiable without resorting to logo branding. The house motto of old was “when your own initials are enough.”At today’s show, held in a clear tent with the sun blazing, the benches were decorated with leather cushions in that maxiintrecciopattern. They’re a useful signifier for Lee’s approach to his first big gig: He respects the house’s heritage, but he’s got an independent streak. The designer wasn’t doing interviews today, but at the Pre-Fall appointment, he said, “I like real clothes. I think there’s a need for a return to elegance and sophistication.” This collection was far bolder than that statement suggests. For the Philophiles wondering, it wasn’t a straight-up Céline redux either.The show started with a black leather tank dress cut with a simplicity that belied the experimentation that would come later. Lee worked leather in all sorts of ways: quilting it into a slim puffer coat with a chain belt, laser-cutting it into small squares linked loosely together on skirts and more tightly on outerwear, and bonding it (apparently) with neoprene to create the look of motocross gear. The biker leather was more believable on the men.Knitwear was a big part of Lee’s vision for both genders, and it produced the collection’s most desirable pieces: subtly sexy sweater dresses with cutaway clavicle-exposing necklines, and another double-layer dress in black and white of twisting, complicated construction that nonetheless looked like it will be easy to wear. A scoop-neck sweater had a substantial gold chain built in. The guys got clingy, asymmetrical, double-layered knits of their own. They’re not a conservative, bourgeois proposition.Neither was Lee’s tailoring. His women’s jackets were cut with a raised collar, which created a strongly sloping shoulder line, or, more compellingly, they were lapel-less with gold hardware at the neckline that created a graceful cut-out framed with leather.
For the men, there were narrow, almost two-dimensional sleeves that extended well past the wrists and a pronounced shoulder line that put Martin Margiela in mind. Most of this marched out on sturdy lug sole boots—real stompers.A lot of what was on the runway was directional enough to challenge the eye, or at least to challenge what we expect from Bottega Veneta. This was an ambitious debut, full of risks. We don’t get a lot of those these days. Watching Lee hone his vision isn’t going to be boring.
22 February 2019
Before we start, let’s do the introductions: Ladies and gentlemen, this isDaniel Lee, whom you might call a known-unknown, a 32-year-old English designer who came toBottega VenetafromCelinein July, replacing Tomas Maier. It’s the Celine part of Lee’s provenance that is salient—if that’s the right word—to the frisson of anticipation about him felt by the legions of women who are still living with post–Phoebe Philo fashion disenfranchisement. Could this protégé of the great woman have learned her touch, her rigor, her practicality, and her covert wit? Or—since goodness knows, there are quadrillions of duplicated Philo-Celine clothes in the world—will Lee strike out and do something uniquely his own?That’s a lot of expectation to put on the shoulders of a young designer, and Lee must certainly feel it. He didn’t seem thrown by it, though, as he walked around the showroom where his first Pre-Fall women’s, men’s, and accessories collections were being given a soft launch before the Fall runway. The first words from his mouth were reassuringly down-to-earth and uplifting at the same time: “I like real clothes. I think there’s a need for a return to elegance and sophistication.” He said he has been looking about the streets of Milan and thinking about how Italian women dress. “I started thinking about film stars like Monica Vitti, and about modern women like Franca and Carla Sozzani.”Lee has lived in New York, London, and Paris since he graduated in theclass of 2011from Central Saint Martins’s M.A. degree course, the fashion boot camp then run by the late professor Louise Wilson (where two of his peers were the designers behindMarques’Almeida). This is his first job in Italy—and his first viewpoint on the culture of northern Italian dress codes, which is home territory well-patrolled by Prada, Max Mara, Salvatore Ferragamo, Ermenegildo Zegna, et al. What can be new? A temptation for an outsider might be to fall into over-reverent pastiche or satire. But at first impression, there was something refreshingly modern and respectful, without being timid, in Lee’s treatment of the canon of black blazers, beige overcoats, silk blouses, gold jewelry, and pumps. “I like structure,” he said. “There has to be quality—well, I came from somewhere that had great fabrics. And, of course, I’ve had to think about leather. Bottega Veneta is based on leather.”
13 December 2018
Tomas Maier and his Bottega Veneta crew were installed at Bronx Community College last week, shooting the designer’s Pre-Spring collections for women and men. If it sounds like an unlikely address for Bottega Veneta, whose new flagship on Madison Avenue took nearly five years to complete and combines three landmarked townhouses, it is and it isn’t. Maier is an avowed architecture buff, and the campus is home to Meister Hall. The Marcel Breuer–designed building is visible in these images, and though there is no direct link between its 1964 cast concrete and the new collection, Maier certainly brings an architect’s discipline to his work.Here it was most readily apparent in the third and final section of the collection, whose patterns—Prince de Galles check, houndstooth—were achieved with a mathematical application of minuscule dots, like kissing cousins to the house signature intrecciato check. This group’s virtue was its cheery graphicism, all the way down to the mirco butterfly-printed bags. The thinking is that by January, when these clothes land in stores, shoppers will be hankering for spring brightness.The first and second groups deliver in November and December, respectively. The first (and to this editor’s eye, most compelling) section was made up of sumptuous yet effortless silk taffeta trapeze dresses with Victoriana touches—wear them belted or not, “whatever you like,” said Maier—and equally voluminous Montgomery coats in the warm, spicy colors of the label’s recent Fall show, as well as a leather skirtsuit with macramé trimming its seams. There were terrific knee-high boots with stacked heels featuring intrecciato detailing in this offering, too.The middle group consisted of wintry washed pastels and a high-low sensibility. Felted cashmere sweaters were paired with moleskin skirts, a holiday party dress was cut in delicate ivory lace over-embroidered with mohair, and a faded parka was lined in Steiff teddy bear fur. Other coats come with removable teddy fur collars. Low is a relative concept chez Bottega Veneta. In the end, each section was intentionally quite distinct. What unified the collection was its delectable exactitude; if it’s rigorous in parts, it’s also rich.
21 May 2018
New York is full of characters. Power brokers up at dawn. Charity-circuit types. The lady who goes down to the bodega in her bathrobe. With a shiny new Madison Avenue flagship to rally around, Tomas Maier brought his Fall Bottega Veneta collections for men and women to New York, and took our great city and its denizens as muse.Fashion Week here is in the midst of a significant identity crisis. New York’s star designers are jumping ship for Paris, while others are opting out of formal shows for studio appointments. The accomplished, experienced Maier arrived from Milan not a moment too soon. House BV secured the American Stock Exchange as a venue (a loaded metaphor in this turbulent week on Wall Street) and built out a set complete with a working fireplace and a John Chamberlain sculpture. Celebrities were enlisted and clients jetted in from all over the U.S. One-off events can be tricky to get right, though, and this one wasn’t without its frustrations—the single, tiny entranceway for the hundreds of us that came to see the show being first and foremost, with the distance between the runway set and the audience a close second. Guests who stuck around for cocktails had a better chance of seeing the exquisite details on these clothes close-up; after the models did their circuits, they lounged on Gio Ponti chairs, gathered around a pair of dinner tables, and otherwise lingered to mingle among the crowd.Maier is devoted to craft, and the workmanship that went into these pieces was not only thoughtful, with its allusions to the skyline, but also quite elaborate. A trio of multicolored wool dresses inspired by the grillwork found in New York City elevators, for example, weren’t printed, but painstakingly embroidered and cut away, revealing not one, but two layers underneath. Other pieces were filigreed with the finest silver chain, as were bags, because why not? In the end, though, this was less an ode to the city’s shining architecture than Maier’s salute to what he sees as New Yorkers’ bold, brave, “there’s a no to nothing” spirit. “Among millions of people, it’s nice to make a mark,” he said. That runs contrary to a statement he made on the occasion of BV’s 50th anniversary: “To be a Bottega customer you have to like something quiet.” Not this time. This time there were jewel tone silk pj sets and onesies for morning trips to the bodega. There’s no place like New York. Is there a lesson there for our displaced native designers?
10 February 2018
New York is full of characters. Power brokers up at dawn. Charity-circuit types. The lady who goes down to the bodega in her bathrobe. With a shiny new Madison Avenue flagship to rally around, Tomas Maier brought his Fall Bottega Veneta collections for men and women to New York, and took our great city and its denizens as muse.Fashion Week here is in the midst of a significant identity crisis. New York’s star designers are jumping ship for Paris, while others are opting out of formal shows for studio appointments. The accomplished, experienced Maier arrived from Milan not a moment too soon. House BV secured the American Stock Exchange as a venue (a loaded metaphor in this turbulent week on Wall Street) and built out a set complete with a working fireplace and a John Chamberlain sculpture. Celebrities were enlisted and clients jetted in from all over the U.S. One-off events can be tricky to get right, though, and this one wasn’t without its frustrations—the single, tiny entranceway for the hundreds of us that came to see the show being first and foremost, with the distance between the runway set and the audience a close second. Guests who stuck around for cocktails had a better chance of seeing the exquisite details on these clothes close-up; after the models did their circuits, they lounged on Gio Ponti chairs, gathered around a pair of dinner tables, and otherwise lingered to mingle among the crowd.Maier is devoted to craft, and the workmanship that went into these pieces was not only thoughtful, with its allusions to the skyline, but also quite elaborate. A trio of multicolored wool dresses inspired by the grillwork found in New York City elevators, for example, weren’t printed, but painstakingly embroidered and cut away, revealing not one, but two layers underneath. Other pieces were filigreed with the finest silver chain, as were bags, because why not? In the end, though, this was less an ode to the city’s shining architecture than Maier’s salute to what he sees as New Yorkers’ bold, brave, “there’s a no to nothing” spirit. “Among millions of people, it’s nice to make a mark,” he said. That runs contrary to a statement he made on the occasion of BV’s 50th anniversary: “To be a Bottega customer you have to like something quiet.” Not this time. This time there were jewel tone silk pj sets and onesies for morning trips to the bodega. There’s no place like New York. Is there a lesson there for our displaced native designers?
10 February 2018
Bottega Veneta is set to open a New York flagship on Madison Avenue early next year, and creative director Tomas Maier will bring his Fall 2018 women’s and men’s collections stateside in February to celebrate. The show promises to be a bright spot in a New York calendar that has lost key players in 2017.Earlier this week, Maier was set up at a studio in the far reaches of Red Hook, Brooklyn, to shoot his Pre-Fall lineup for the label. He said he designed it as a bridge between the Spring offering he presented in Milan less than two months ago and the Fall one that will be shown in New York in early February—in Manhattan, folks, not to worry. So, it started with the pale makeup tones of Spring, only minus the intense embellishments that defined that collection. Washed georgette slips and sheer lace dresses layered over trompe l’oeil–printed shifts struck a delicate, romantic note. He had early summer weddings in mind when he made them.The second and third groupings, which will arrive in stores later in the season, introduced bolder colors and lively prints to the story. There wasn’t a pair of pants in the lineup, and the legginess of the collection was emphasized by the high-heeled patent pumps he showed with each look. But these sections were less about dresses than they were about ensemble dressing: a sleeveless ’60s-ish plaid shift topped by a reversible color-blocked, double-faced cashmere coat; a paper leather skirtsuit, backed in silk jersey so it feels good against the skin; a yellow checked coat and blue checked skirt combination tailor-made for a modern-day Kim Novak. The pulled-together, spiffy attitude came across as quite American—a fitting attribute considering the brand’s big investment on Madison Avenue.
16 November 2017
Tomas Maier took us to Milan’s Palazzo Archinto for his men’s and women’s Spring 2018 show this morning. Once a residence, it is now a school—the girl boarders watched with apparent delight through the open windows of their third-floor dormitory—and the location seemed purposefully chosen to convey feelings of hope for the future. Maier has noticed that things aren’t so great out there right now; the world’s prospects look sort of bleak. Backstage afterward, he said he went with color and embellishment this season—and there was certainly no shortage of either—because of their optimistic properties. Bottega Veneta happens to be opening its biggest store in the world on New York’s Madison Avenue in January, and these will be the clothes and accessories on display from day one, so there was also a bit of savvy retail strategy at play here.A sophisticated sense of color is one of Maier’s gifts as a designer. Lauren Hutton—sitting front row in a dusty pink ’40s dress from his last collection—and her similarly attired seatmates were living proof. For Spring, he took a liberated approach to color. As an example, consider the deft manner in which he combined a blush suede coat, a chartreuse silk shirt, and a lilac suede skirt. The barely-there shade of a peach-rose silk trench was especially lovely worn over a paillette-strewn dress. And the color therapy was equal-opportunity. Men wore green suede shoes and carried lavender leather totes. Maier noted that men’s fashion is changing; they aren’t playing it quite as safe as in the past, though he smartly reserved the metal grommeting and jewel stud embellishments (the collection’s other big story) for the ladies.Evening and day pieces alike got the embellishment treatment. It could range from an accent, seen in the pocket grommeting of a ’60s-style skirtsuit, to full-on razzmatazz, as in the case of a floor-length dress with channels of multicolored jewels from neck to hem. Shapes were mostly simple and straightforward as a balance to all the adornment. Still, he was playing against type with some of the fringing. Subtler interpretations of the look, like an apricot calf-leather trench, intricately worked with nailhead studs, and a jean jacket with kaleidoscopic snakeskin patchworking, showcased the extraordinary craftsmanship of the house’s workshops and Maier’s innate sense of elegance.
2 October 2017
Tomas Maier took us to Milan’s Palazzo Archinto for his men’s and women’s Spring 2018 show this morning. Once a residence, it is now a school—the girl boarders watched with apparent delight through the open windows of their third-floor dormitory—and the location seemed purposefully chosen to convey feelings of hope for the future. Maier has noticed that things aren’t so great out there right now; the world’s prospects look sort of bleak. Backstage afterward, he said he went with color and embellishment this season—and there was certainly no shortage of either—because of their optimistic properties. Bottega Veneta happens to be opening its biggest store in the world on New York’s Madison Avenue in January, and these will be the clothes and accessories on display from day one, so there was also a bit of savvy retail strategy at play here.A sophisticated sense of color is one of Maier’s gifts as a designer. Lauren Hutton—sitting front row in a dusty pink ’40s dress from his last collection—and her similarly attired seatmates were living proof. For Spring, he took a liberated approach to color. As an example, consider the deft manner in which he combined a blush suede coat, a chartreuse silk shirt, and a lilac suede skirt. The barely-there shade of a peach-rose silk trench was especially lovely worn over a paillette-strewn dress. And the color therapy was equal-opportunity. Men wore green suede shoes and carried lavender leather totes. Maier noted that men’s fashion is changing; they aren’t playing it quite as safe as in the past, though he smartly reserved the metal grommeting and jewel stud embellishments (the collection’s other big story) for the ladies.Evening and day pieces alike got the embellishment treatment. It could range from an accent, seen in the pocket grommeting of a ’60s-style skirtsuit, to full-on razzmatazz, as in the case of a floor-length dress with channels of multicolored jewels from neck to hem. Shapes were mostly simple and straightforward as a balance to all the adornment. Still, he was playing against type with some of the fringing. Subtler interpretations of the look, like an apricot calf-leather trench, intricately worked with nailhead studs, and a jean jacket with kaleidoscopic snakeskin patchworking, showcased the extraordinary craftsmanship of the house’s workshops and Maier’s innate sense of elegance.
23 September 2017
After so many highly caffeinated, early weekend mornings watching Tomas Maier’s Milan Fashion Week collections for Bottega Veneta, the chance to witness this Cruise collection shoot proved a satisfying contextual twist. The location lacked the luxuriousness of Bottega Veneta’s HQ—it was a studio alongside some soccer pitches on the outskirts of the outskirts of town—but the consolation was fresh insight into Maier’s practice and enthusiasm. As models including Binx Walton and Joan Smalls back-and-forthed between the racks and the set, Maier said: “So, the Cruise collection.” Then with a tilt of his head and a narrowing of his eyes, he added: “What does that mean, Cruise, right? We should rename that collection, because I think the customer behavior has completely changed. Nobody buys clothes for some time in the future, to go awayeventually. They buy clothes that they want to wear right now.”Such rejection of anachronism, however romantic, is surely important for an industry whose success is defined by relevance. Here, Maier said he simply considered the real life of his customers in the real-time retail lifespan of this collection, between October 2017 through January 2018. The opening sallies included jersey dresses in blue and green with grid details at the hip, black jets at the neckline, and shadow-pleated skirts. Two reversible shearlings featured intarsia waves or crescents, wings, and teardrops on the suede side, and dyed mirrors of that pattern on the wool side. Suede skirts were teamed with felted boiled cashmere sweaters.A burgundy napa coat featured deeply analogue fastening on wide-billowed pockets whose width hid scarlet panels at the side. A series of plain or windowpane cashmere coats and jackets—double-faced and with almost unfeasibly contour-less seaming details at the shoulder—prefaced more rugged options. Coats and field jackets and skirts, again with bold-emphasized pleats, came in cotton twill, poplin, or faille and sometimes featured studlets that whispered of Bottega Veneta’s last runway collection. The jackets had intrecciato engraved buttons, which are as close as Bottega Veneta gets to branding. Chunky heeled shoes teamed with black-on-blush silk socks pulled high—too cute—provided ongoing consistency through detail.Maier’s final two sections were a whisper more whimsical, designed for overt display. In the first, jacquard knit dresses featured a fantastical mass fluttering of monochromatic butterflies.
And in the second, a section of ivory-color pieces that looked silky but were polyester duchesse and ran the gamut from track jacket to evening dress featured gorgeous botanical inspirations inspired by Albrecht Dürer. Forget Warhol or Hirst: Six hundred years ago, Dürer made himself a fortune by applying his unprecedented talent for realistic representation to an early form of mass production, engraving. The combination of poetic artistry and pragmatic nous is something shared with Maier.
22 May 2017
It looked like the 1940s, it walked like the 1940s, but Tomas Maier wasn’t admitting to it. Rather, backstage he was talking about starting his women’s collection with “a silhouette—like an illustration—with a strong shoulder.” Never mind, Maier should just relax and bask in the ’40s feedback. Any offering of a glamorous feminine look with structured polish about it is a surprising rarity on today’s runways, and the dresses that appeared towards the end of his show were shining examples of it. The puff-sleeved, high-waisted midi dresses in dusty blue, yellow, and pink (looks 50–54), worn with sheer black stockings and hairdos set in a wave, sent women whispering and pointing as they passed. Dresses like that are flattering, instantly framing the wearer as a vintage movie heroine in her own mind.The finale that followed included some of the most spectacular evening gowns of the season—a floor-length gunmetal column under a magnificent black cape (worn by Joan Smalls), and a tissue-fine bronze pleated dress with smocking at the waist and an antique gold corseted fishtail. All of them were the kind of high-status Academy Award–worthy looks that set minds speculating on whether there was time for them to be airlifted from Milan to Hollywood for tomorrow night’s Oscars.Granted, Maier is usually categorized as a modern-minded tailor. Most of the collection focused on just that: a sequence of double-faced cashmere blanket capes and double-breasted coats in spice color (one of the latter in a curly textured fabric like a Steiff fur). Amongst them were an outstanding clean-cut black jumpsuit and a slick black dominatrix leather tailored skirt suit, which—with only a tiny leap of imagination—could have almost stepped out of Ridley Scott’s originalBlade Runner. All in all, it was the kind of collection that would have kept Helmut Newton very happy in his heyday of shooting Yves Saint Laurent in ParisVogue.Yet that was only the half of it, because the rest was the Bottega Veneta menswear collection for Fall. How to describe it? Sober and sparse, yet occasionally dandified with bow ties. The male and female models seemed to belong to parallel worlds. Here we can agree with Maier; they didn’t have a ’40s look at all. That, though, posed a question for Maier to resolve in coming seasons. Showing womenswear and menswear together (which is increasingly happening in these cost-conscious times) in one long catwalk show can swiftly lead to audience fatigue.
The age-old convention of the single-file runway show is being broken down all over the place, and that’s another story of the season. Tomas Maier, as creatively accomplished as he is, could give thought to rethinking the format so there’s more of a relationship between the sexes next time.
28 February 2017
It looked like the 1940s, it walked like the 1940s, but Tomas Maier wasn’t admitting to it. Rather, backstage he was talking about starting his women’s collection with “a silhouette—like an illustration—with a strong shoulder.” Never mind, Maier should just relax and bask in the ’40s feedback. Any offering of a glamorous feminine look with structured polish about it is a surprising rarity on today’s runways, and the dresses that appeared towards the end of his show were shining examples of it. The puff-sleeved, high-waisted midi dresses in dusty blue, yellow, and pink (looks 50–54), worn with sheer black stockings and hairdos set in a wave, sent women whispering and pointing as they passed. Dresses like that are flattering, instantly framing the wearer as a vintage movie heroine in her own mind.The finale that followed included some of the most spectacular evening gowns of the season—a floor-length gunmetal column under a magnificent black cape (worn by Joan Smalls), and a tissue-fine bronze pleated dress with smocking at the waist and an antique gold corseted fishtail. All of them were the kind of high-status Academy Award–worthy looks that set minds speculating on whether there was time for them to be airlifted from Milan to Hollywood for tomorrow night’s Oscars.Granted, Maier is usually categorized as a modern-minded tailor. Most of the collection focused on just that: a sequence of double-faced cashmere blanket capes and double-breasted coats in spice color (one of the latter in a curly textured fabric like a Steiff fur). Amongst them were an outstanding clean-cut black jumpsuit and a slick black dominatrix leather tailored skirt suit, which—with only a tiny leap of imagination—could have almost stepped out of Ridley Scott’s originalBlade Runner. All in all, it was the kind of collection that would have kept Helmut Newton very happy in his heyday of shooting Yves Saint Laurent in ParisVogue.Yet that was only the half of it, because the rest was the Bottega Veneta menswear collection for Fall. How to describe it? Sober and sparse, yet occasionally dandified with bow ties. The male and female models seemed to belong to parallel worlds. Here we can agree with Maier; they didn’t have a ’40s look at all. That, though, posed a question for Maier to resolve in coming seasons. Showing womenswear and menswear together (which is increasingly happening in these cost-conscious times) in one long catwalk show can swiftly lead to audience fatigue.
The age-old convention of the single-file runway show is being broken down all over the place, and that’s another story of the season. Tomas Maier, as creatively accomplished as he is, could give thought to rethinking the format so there’s more of a relationship between the sexes next time.
25 February 2017
Tomas Maier celebrated his 15th anniversary atBottega Venetasimultaneously with the brand’s 50th in Milan in September. It was one of the season’s most moving moments, with Maier leading a clapping, teary-eyed parade of his design studio members around the perimeter of the Accademia di Brera, a Spring collection that showcased his classy, unflashy sense of luxury (evening dresses in cotton!), and Lauren Hutton sporting a reproduction of the BV clutch she carried inAmerican Gigolo. About two months later, Maier was in New York yesterday shooting the label’s Pre-Fall lookbook; fashion slows down for no man, not even one who just checked off a pair of major milestones.The warehouse in Long Island City where the shoot was taking place had nothing on the historic Accademia, but Maier’s new collection comes with persuasions of its own. Take, for starters, a series of 1940s-inflected dresses in muted pastels, pieced together from a patchwork of delicate prints, or featuring embroideries like beaded starbursts at the nipped waist and nailhead studs tracing the shadow of the neckline. Each one was an understated delight. Among the fluid, floor-length evening numbers in viscose jersey, the star was a graceful black dress with encrustations of Art Deco crystals at the shoulders. That black dress and a navy smoking jacket and skirt aside, the big takeaway here was color. A double-face cashmere coat reversed from burnt orange to brilliant ochre, zesty hues that were reproduced on jacquard outerwear and knits alike, and used for sharp leather tailoring. Arrayed neatly on racks, each look was accompanied by a bag and a complementary, but not necessarily matching, shoe. The impression was one of experimentation and play, the rigors of the collection schedule notwithstanding. Woven intrecciato shoulder bags with metal chain embroideries were new standouts.
21 November 2016
Gigi HadidandLauren Hutton, two modeling greats of their times, walked arm in arm as Tomas Maier's symbol of what Bottega Veneta is all about—a classy way of carrying on. Hadid was wearing a sporty, dusty rose pink taffeta top and pants, Hutton a beige trench coat. Maier doesn't do pomp and ceremony; his spring collection was, even by his rigorous standards, an extreme exercise in restraint—or as he described it afterward, about the aesthetics of "nothing" clothes. Yet this was a grand occasion: the celebration of the 50th anniversary ofBottega Veneta. The connection with Hutton is that she carried an intrecciato woven clutch bag in the 1980 movieAmerican Gigolo. It's been reproduced as a company milestone re-edition among 14 other bags from the archive.The value of the living tradition of Italian handwork has been a theme ofMilan Fashion Week—with the vocal support of the Italian prime minister. But as wondrous as Bottega Veneta's unique handwoven technique may be (or anyone's, for that matter), crafts can only be made exciting and desirable in the light of fashion, and that's what Maier has successfully brought to the accessory house in his time as creative director. He takes issue, though, with many of the practices of fashion marketing. When asked backstage if he intended to make a point about Bottega being a house for grownups, he shot back, "It's never about an age group. I dislike any kind of classification, by skin tone or age—it's something I detest." Rather, to be a Bottega customer, "you need to like something quiet" and to be "a little more cultivated about materials."If his work is age-neutral, it's also season-free. The uncompromisingly dark palette he chose to open the show—with its brown ostrich and crocodile coats and jackets, dark green leather, black knit polo shirts, and charcoal midis and raincoats—could have been for fall. Was this a see-now-buy-now collection? Hardly. Maier's point is not commercial immediacy, but continuity and longevity with a focus on answering lifestyle needs. He's whittled those solutions down to shirtwaist dresses, coat dresses, pantsuits, and knits—and he took us through shades and permutations of them, right up until Hutton and Hadid walked out, to a standing ovation.
24 September 2016
One might suspectBottega Venetaof wanting to have its cake and eat it, too, by making a big ta-dah about showing next Spring’s men’s collection at its women’s show in Milan this September, yet then rolling it out for review in the showroom here now. However, the reason—a double anniversary of 50 years of the house and 15 years of Tomas Maier’s captaincy of it—is fair enough. In the showroom this collection looked worthy of a double celebration, too. The broader undercurrent was an exploration of 1930s and ’40s workwear shapes—luxurified, naturally—and peppered with house intrecciato details. A crinkled lamé biker in wind-blasted walnut tone was accented with ribboned intrecciato and hung on the rail above wide-legged high-waisted walnut cotton pants with a three-inch turn-up and deep burgundy faux monk-strap slip-on shoes. Irregular checked nylon jackets and treated merino knits patched with triangle patches—puzzle pieces—of mixed leathers betrayed Maier’s yen for considered richness.Techno-moleskin pants were patch-pocketed and utilitarian of cut. Thirty percent silk suits had a subtle shine and were displayed to be worn above shirts of cotton bonded to knit with embroidered detailings. There was a Gabicci-ness to these cocktails of merino and leather. Cotton pants in a green pattern that looked hand-painted but weren’t had a camouflage meets Dutch print meets mid-century upholstery vibe to them. There were more bikers in camouflage, a mighty shamrock fils-on-fils woven jacket, and a stand-out dusty pink leisure suit. Crinkled cotton linen double-breasted suits in citrine were worn above a zippered-off yellow smock top. Techno moleskin returned in cinch-back worker’s pants. There was a fine double-bonded matte and shiny calf jacket. The shoes were predominantly saddleshoes served white of vamp and quarter.The show in September will be in a special Milan venue—as yet unrevealed. It will be interesting to see how this collection of luxury povera threads though the intrecciato of whatever Maier is cooking up for womenwear.
20 June 2016
Tomas Maieris first out of the gate with his Resort collection forBottega Veneta, and if his offering is any indication of the direction things will go for Resort—or Pre-Spring or whatever we’re calling it these days—it should be an optimistic, upbeat season. Bright color is key for Maier: There was the snappy green of a skirtsuit worn with a matching cashmere shirt; a drapey velvet dévoré dress in a gorgeous, almost electric shade of purple; and a lush shearling robe coat in carnation pink striped with black. He also believes in mixing unexpected hues, so a lightweight, shiny lambskin coat in a red-brown he called Calvados was shown with a skirt in Brighton blue and a citrine-yellow silk blouse—a fearless combination that totally worked.Another clue about the season to come? Designers might finally be tiring of athleisure. Maier made a point of avoiding sportswear in favor of tailoring and a strong emphasis on outerwear. “It’s very proper,” he said of the overall effect. What allowed the almost prim daytime silhouettes to feel modern was his use of lightweight and, in the case of the neoprene pieces, techy fabrics. The black leather trench came with woven intrecciato details, a nice touch. For evening, he traded the decorous attitude for something more laid-back. Long silk jersey dresses and a couple of others in a graphically printed Japanese crepe were accessorized with flat skimmer shoes.
19 May 2016
It’s amazing how so few designers realize the abject appreciation they’ll be given for allowing women a glimpse of simple, reserved, perfectly cut tailoring. From the moment Jamie Bochert opened theBottega Venetashow wearing a long black cashmere coat, black turtleneck, slim,veryslightly flared pants, and a long and skinny knitted scarf wound around her neck, Tomas Maier should have felt the audience love radiating all the way backstage. Anyway: With this season, he has come to his senses, dispensed with theme (who needs it?) and applied himself the one thing which is so frustratingly elusive to find in today’s hotchpotch fancied-up fashion: a method for looking grown-up, and proud of it.In the febrile celebrity model–spotting atmosphere of the shows in Milan, it was notable that this time, it was Brochart and the dignified Julia Nobis (dressed in a pale beige cashmere pantsuit) who magnetized envious eyes.Kendall Jennerwas there on the runway later, too, wearing a purple knit dress that made her look considerably older than her years. But essentially, this is a collection which separates the women from the girls. You suddenly realized that you must aspire to be old enough to wear these clothes—and how many collections can make a woman feel positively relaxed and smug about that?Maier is a middle-aged man who has no fear of looking at his female counterparts and figuring out what’s in their minds and where they've come from. Looking closely at such things as the leopard-spot pony-skin coat, or the ochre and black belted cardigan, and the proportions of the pants, with the silvered high heel boots beneath, you could read subtle messages being bleeped to the consciousness of a generation; the ineffable chic of a mother or grandmother’s ’50s wardrobe; the hidden nod to teen memories of what felt good about the ’70s. Though so subsumed into modern fabrics—a cool black crunched-up plastic coat, a tweed subtly glinting with minute, transparent sequins—that nothing could be found on a vintage market. There comes an age when you don’t want to retrofit yourself to old clothes.That is Maier’s other strength—he is a fanatic about pushing modern techniques. New Italian machinery has brought about a revolution in knitting—it almost seems too crude a term, now, to describe the waisted, full-skirted, almost lingerie-fine dresses he engineered for this collection.
They were followed by yet more innovation: pintucked dresses in smoky chiffon, layered over fine satin underdresses, printed with tiny flowers. Amid all this, he also showed a lovely selection of Deco-influenced necklaces, drop earrings, brooches, and barrettes with green stones—a gesture which still further signaled the impression that Maier is speaking to a woman who has earned the wherewithal to put herself together. All in all, this was a triumph.
27 February 2016
At Bottega Veneta, Tomas Maier has been at the vanguard of the now-industry-wide integration of athletic codes into the highest echelons of luxury. But cashmere track pants are now ten-a-penny. So in this collection Maier pushed onwards—and simultaneously upwards and downwards. He said: “It's about the silhouette. I felt it needed change. All the sportswear-inspired elements that we have been putting in: It’s time to move on. It’s becoming a trend, lots of people are doing that, I don't need to do it forever.”This languid rejection of consensus was made plain in an opening movement of black or dark gray suiting, with just one snowflake of white shirting. The jackets were cut low and unvented, to flow to below the buttock. The pants beneath them were neither narrow nor wide: They werelong. A low break at the ankle, very slight, acted as subtle pediment for this vertically accentuated silhouette. Still, the suits came, framed by narrow trailing scarves.Where was the leather? It arrived via a matte zipped tote in a ripe raspberry, barolo red with a mighty black leather parka. Then via an authoritarian leather greatcoat incongruously accented with a twisted cravat. That red, plus a saturated blue and a wine-bottle green were asserted as significant elements of this collection’s color story in coats and leather biker pants zippered at the front of each leg from top to bottom. Two cellophane bonded leather coats glittered with reflected light. Rich checked wools with a miasma of fuzz—Cheviot, the wool aficionado next to me, ventured—were a static of yellow and black. A cashmere suit in loden green was spray-painted to richen its color more deeply. Two male models and one female wore three linen-based velvet suits—in olive, teal-touched turquoise, and purple—whose color wrestled with sundown shadowing of blackness. There were more women’s looks thanks to a sprinkling of complementary imports from Pre-Fall. Muted check jackets and check-collared cabans augured the arrival of two needle-punched check coats that were a seamless collage of softly complementary right angles. The real emphasis of the collection though was on the vertical. You’ll need to be tall and lean to wear those suits to the maximum effect; when you do you'll look even taller and leaner. We shorties can just look on and admire—and then buy a caban.
17 January 2016
Color, print, and texture were the big messages fromTomas Maierfor Pre-Fall. Arranged on racks in the label’s New York City showroom, the collection was divided into distinct, but coordinating groups. Warm coats and vests combined different shades of short and long shearling with goat hair. Floor-length jersey dresses were spliced together like intarsia, a much more complicated technique than merely printing the fabric would’ve been. Tailored pieces, too, were patchworked together from a tropical wool and cashmere blend material in multiple colors, thoughpatchworkis too crafty a word for the sharp results.A lot of thought and work went into these clothes, in other words. Maier is a designer who values the process of making things. His trick was to render those labor-intensive pieces in truly effortless ways.Effortlessis an overused word in fashion, but it was especially apt here, what with the flats he opted to pair with most of the looks. Those flats followed a similar m.o.: demanding for Maier and co. to do, but not to wear. On some pairs, the leather was printed with a micro floral, woven in the house-signature intrecciato styleandembroidered. They looked particularly sweet accessorizing light-as-air chiffon dresses in mixed prints with rickrack trim—high-summer versions of the smash-hit printed dresses from Maier’sSpring ’13 BV collectionthat we all remember so well.
9 December 2015
The great outdoors was calling this morning atBottega Veneta. It’s Indian summer here in Milan, and everyone working in the city is trying to hold on to that serene vacation mood while the sunshine lasts. So isTomas Maier, it seems, as he showed a collection inspired by “big country,” open air, trekking, and sailing. The farther he can get from an urban environment, he says, “the better it gets.”With the exception of teenagers, most everybody can relate to that impulse, and Bottega Veneta has never been for the underage anyway. Maier’s self-appointed task is to get inside the desires of women with money to spend, and for Spring he is persuading them to crave more casual clothes. He opened with looks evolved from tracksuits, with zippered jackets and cropped pants; throughout his daywear, he wove a brownish-green camouflage theme patched in with leopard print. On the feet: flat loafers, thong sandals, and clogs.Still, there’s no avoiding the fact that Bottega Veneta’s customers must eventually face the city and its various social occasions. So for the urban jungle, there was a tailored pantsuit and blouse printed in Maier’s abstract camo pattern—not exactly designed for merging into the background but rather for standing out from the herd as a bold fashion-adopter (printed pantsuits have been head-turners atGucci,Versace, andRoberto Cavalli, too). There was one intricately pieced red leather and python coat and several patchworked shift dresses that radiated the kind of highly crafted exclusiveness Bottega Veneta fans love.What do you do when you want to bring a sense of the big outdoors to party dresses, though? Maier’s solution: frocks in techno-cottons, ingeniously wrapped and grommeted, with slim guy-ropes as shoulder straps. They weren’t exactly tents, but some of them had that feeling about them. Maybe for a woman who’d secretly rather spend her summer nights under the stars?
26 September 2015
"Taking a spiritual rest in nature," was Tomas Maier's intent with Bottega Veneta's Spring collection for men. And if that sounded like Reese Witherspoon ready to goWildon the West Coast, then that wasn't such a wrong note for Maier to strike. The music struck those same chords too, Steve Mackey's soundtrack chiming like a Windham Hill record, the waves and wind adding to a perfect aural backdrop for a hike through the redwoods. Except it wasn't New Age totem Windham Hill, it was actually snatches fromTouching the VoidandKundun, and both pieces of music cued something more extreme. Something "wild," in fact.Maier has always loved clothes that look like they've lived. The knits with their necklines stretched out were a great example here. And with this collection, he also had a ready-made, all-weather, all-terrain scenario. But he came at it from a surprising angle. The silhouettes—parkas and fitted pants with snapped hems and quilted jackets—suited the story and, yes, there were a few of the technical pieces you might expect: Some of the pants were fleece, for instance, and trekking boots featured among the footwear (very attractive they were too). The striated quilting effects on plush blousons looked like water or wind running through sand. That was outdoorsy.But Maier was also fiercely attached to the shiny fluidity of cupro, an unusual fabric to see in a collection which its designer spoke of as a return to an elemental mood. Cupro looks good at night, in a disco. Here, it loaned a languid, jewel-toned, almost-decadent edge, like a last gasp of the world our seeker for inner peace might be trying to leave. As airy-fairy as that idea sounds, it does acknowledge the curious tension that always crouches at the heart of a Maier collection. Likewise a teal blue blazer that sat at the end of the show like a gorgeous alien chick in a nest of ticking-stripe quilting and repurposed militarywear. Maybe Maier was acknowledging his man wants his inner peace without actually relinquishing his good old bad time.A literal footnote: Socks and sandals, once voted worst fashion faux pas, reign supreme in Milan as the footwear of choice for Spring 2016. German package tourists will be the very height of chic come next summer.
21 June 2015
There are a lot of ways to look at clothes. This season, Tomas Maier kept adjusting his point of view, like a movie director shifting camera angles. He started with a panorama—imagining the landscape circa mid-November, when most of this collection will be delivered to stores—and proposing bright colors as a balm for overcast, darkening days. Then he zoomed in for extreme close-ups, fastening his attention on details such as a daggered jacket collar, or the dot pattern on a patchwork-pleated skirt created via appliqué. Finally, he panned out again, to get the full-length take on the clothes he himself considers most important: As Maier explained at an appointment today, he can only confirm his impression of clothes by seeing them on a model in a mirror, the better to catch the overall effect his looks make. That's the perspective that allows Maier to make the myriad adjustments to proportion and line and flow that give his Bottega Veneta clothes their sense of effortless specialness.Witness, for instance, the patchwork-pleated skirts and dresses here, with their shards of black fabric that served to visually winnow the waist. Elsewhere, Maier played a similar trick with his high-waist trousers of lightweight wool gabardine, color-blocking them above the hip to give a slouchy attitude. The trousers were one silhouette in this collection's fine range of tailoring, a theme that Maier emphasized; there were also sportier takes on masculine garb, such as trim leather bombers and track jackets pieced together from multicolor swatches of suede or the high-end activewear fabric also used in blouses and abbreviated A-line skirts. Maier's graphic use of color was the obvious through-line, among these very varied looks. Closer inspection, meanwhile, revealed that the real continuity of this collection was to be found in the make of the clothes, with luxe transitional-weight fabrics and unlined coat construction endowing everything with a sense of movement and ease. Those tactile elements can't be seen in a mirror. Yet somehow, they can still be seen.
6 May 2015
Tomas Maier is done with ballet.Finito. His Fall clothes for Bottega Veneta could hardly be more different than the easy, dancer-ly layers he showed last season. Structure replaced slouch, and electric color took over from faded neutrals. Sweeping shifts haven't tended to be the Maier way, but that's what we got this season, starting from the very first look: Edie Campbell again, but this time in a Lurex dot sweater and matching tailored men's pants.Just before she hit the runway, David Bowie was on the soundtrack, narrating Sergei Prokofiev'sPeter and the Wolf: "Each character in this tale is going to be represented by a different instrument of the orchestra." Campbell's black-on-white op art spots, and the head-to-toe ones that followed on a sweater vest, silk blouse, and full-legged trousers, among other looks, are not for the tame. Neither was a cape in an oversize, crosshatched motif with pronounced epaulet-tailored shoulders. But that was sort of the point. This was Maier—possibly bored, probably tired of all the sameness in fashion—trumpeting not the subdued sophistication he normally does chez BV, but renegade individuality.He was operating with utter conviction here, and when a designer does that, it's compelling. Still, you sensed the bold approach will give some of his loyal fans pause. Maier was at his most persuasive when he tempered the graphics with other things in a slightly lower key, like the brushstroke-print skirt that was worn with a jacquard sweater, or a crosshatched sweatshirt he paired with a simple black skirt. Short cocktail dresses, whose geometric patterns and bright colors were veiled in black lace that inched up the neck to flutter at the chin, looked sensational. Giving women a little personal wiggle room just might be the most individual gesture of all.For Tim Blanks' take on Bottega Veneta, watch this video.
28 February 2015
Tomas Maier claimed inspiration from "the creative life" for his latest Bottega Veneta collection. The man he had in mind was "someone who doesn't think about clothes; he dresses from necessity—'It's cold, I'll wear a cardigan.'" That nonchalance underpinned the seemingly random ways that fabrics and colors were pulled together—or, in the case of the elasticized-waist trousers that were a key ingredient of the collection, pulled on. They were just about the most banal item we've ever seen in a major fashion collection, let alone one that stands for the last word in luxury, but it was a testament to Maier's perverse skills that he made their casualness look relatively sophisticated. He's always pursued the notion of "clothes that have lived a life," and the pull-on pant certainly made that grade in a rust knit, matched to a purple blouson in a washed corduroy, or a similarly shaded velvet under a gray suede coat, or pink cord under a camel jacket.Someone had a lot of fun naming the colors in this collection: The purple was "byzantine," orange was "persimmon," gray was "ardoise," and pink was "mallow," which suggested that the creative life Maier envisaged was one lived by an artist. In fact, the collection's random air was evenly matched by tailored pieces—a double-breasted suit, jackets in a pied-de-poule or classic herringbone—that added a suited sartorial edge evocative of the way even the artiest types dressed before the '60s ripped up the rule book and cast it to the winds. Squint and you might see a young Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon in the tousle-haired insouciance of the models. There were other details that compounded that impression, like the rim of a white shirt collar painted Kelly green, or the blurry overlay of color on a broad-shouldered jacket in herringbone. It was in such transformative flourishes that Maier made his design presence felt, subtly transfiguring the overtly familiar with his own artistry.
18 January 2015
Tomas Maier may be fashion's premier alchemist. In his hands, just about anything, even something seemingly naff, is transformed into good taste. This season's Bottega Veneta collection was a case in point, chock-full of ideas that on the surface could have been iffy. Spray-painted coats and cashmere knits. Tweed check paired with a slightly different knit check worn over a button-down with yet another version of the check printed, glossily, on the collar. A tangerine-toned top-and-skirt set. Lime green, in general. The list goes on. It's really impossible to figure out how he does it, but Maier has the ability to make a sort of garish, magnified mineral print wear like a sober neutral. The trick, of course, is in the detail—the trim proportions of that tangerine leather look, for instance, made it read as rather understated. The juxtaposition of all those mismatched checks was finessed to just-so perfection. Maier's spray-painted coats and knits worked to give his decorous, '60s-ish silhouettes an industrial gloss, updating the aesthetic and veering it away from retro kitsch. Imagine Camelot-era Jackie Kennedy on a tour of the gallery scene in late-'90s East Berlin—that was the tone. Inevitably, it worked. And in both directions; the quirky touches helped him avoid the trap of dull good taste. Maier's best bad ideas were his duchesse satin sweats—which he said he could see worn for day or evening—and his demurely ridiculous shoes. What woman doesn't want to be so fabulous that she can just slouch around town in duchesse? And what woman won't—more realistically—feel a little smile creep into her heart as she dons a pair of this season's quirky multicolored block heels? Truly, Maier is the man with the Midas touch.
10 December 2014
Tomas Maier has a distaste for workout clothes—"horrific spandex outfits," he called them backstage, with an expressive shudder. In keeping with his men's show in June, today's Bottega Veneta collection was about dance. "Wouldn't it be better to work on a ballet barre and focus on posture, instead of your six-pack?" he asked. Well, it would if you could wear Maier's clothes while you're at it. It's the ultimate luxury to buy your sweats from BV.The show began with glorified activewear—tanks, Henleys, leggings, a chunky sweater to throw over all of them—in pale neutrals and supple, touchable fabrics. You were tempted to reach out and brush your hand against the ice-gray washed suede of a trench. Nobody romances walking-around clothes like Maier did here. But even as the show progressed, he imbued it all with a ballerina's grace: Skirts were long and full above macramé and leather skimmers, and light-as-air gingham cardigans twisted around the torso of matching checked dresses, belting gently at the waist. With her pixie cut and swan neck, a model in a net tank and delicate skirt embroidered with channels of sequins conjured Audrey Hepburn at her sylphiest. If the deluxe workoutwear at the beginning was utterly of the moment, a corrective response to what Maier sees on the street, the dressier pieces had mid-century undertones, a better version of the 1950s. While there was nothing so obvious as an honest-to-goodness tutu, you could see how stage costumes might've inspired the swatches of sequins planted here and there on the front of an otherwise almost humble cotton poplin dress, or the transparent net overlay on a V-neck sheath.After sweatshirt cotton, denim is the next best comfort fabric, and Maier did a fair bit of experimenting with it here. On other Milan runways, it's been faded and distressed; at BV it was raw, dark, and pressed stiff, with unfinished edges, the implication being that Maier expects you to do the wearing-in yourself. A highly likely prospect.
20 September 2014
Tomas Maier professed amazement at the changes in the men he sees on the streets of New York, unabashedly displaying their pampered selves. "They're taking over the female role," he said wonderingly. Which is good news for a designer like Maier, who has always played to a man's physical, sensual side. And never more so than with today's Bottega Veneta show, which, he said, was more about "movement and freedom" than anything he's done before.In keeping with that, Maier showed a collection that was inspired by dancers, everyone from Nureyev and Baryshnikov to break-dancers in the street. Elevated by some particularly empathetic styling, the theme infused a presentation of deluxe workout wear. With their headbands and tap shoes, washed-out scoop-neck tank tops, rolled-up track pants, and long johns, the models were Broadway hoofers fresh from rehearsal (though you wondered how many of them could afford theintrecciatobackpack, the signature bag of the collection).Maier likes clothes that look like they've lived a life, so he added some extravagantly worn knits to the mix, including one sweater that appeared to have been attacked with a paint roller, and another that seemed to have a child's crayon scrawl around the neck. Everything was unbuttoned, folded down, rolled up. In this context, even the more conventional clothes the designer showed—like a generously cut double-breasted suit—took on a louche physicality. There is often an iconic Hollywood reference buried deep in Maier's collections, and here the one that came to mind was James Dean at his dance classes in the fifties. However much a flight of fancy that might be, it's hard to imagine Maier disapproving.
21 June 2014
"I can't show you a stretch pant and a T-shirt." That was Tomas Maier in the Bottega Veneta showroom today, presenting the label's Resort collection for 2015. Some designers do take a straightforward approach to in-between seasons like Resort and Pre-Fall, but Maier's not one of them. BV's creative director is as intrigued by process as he is by the final product, a fact that his new clothes crystalized.He started with the idea of bleach and how laundering a garment in the stuff can fade it in random ways. Extending that notion, he used a process called corrosion to remove color from pieces in graphic patterns—bleach stripes at the neckline of a crisp cotton shirt, a white floral motif on a lilac top. Other times, the actual substance of a material was changed, as in the case of a dévoré blouse and a jacquard flower-print lamé miniskirt.Maier's trick was that nothing felt contrived. Industrially washed for a faded effect, his knit sweaters were utterly simple, yet completely divine. And that enviable sense of simplicity extended into his evening dresses. No ball gowns or bustiers here, of course. Maier's long dresses are modeled after tank tops and T-shirts. The ease is built right in; the drama comes from the way he corroded and then over-dyed them. One featured a bold grid pattern, another an abstract, oversize floral. Perhaps the best part: When they go into production, no two dresses will ever be 100 percent the same. "I like that," Maier said, "and it's good for the customer."
6 May 2014
A few seasons back, Tomas Maier did a Bottega Veneta collection solely devoted to dresses. The one he showed today had a similarly sharp focus. Not a pair of pants or, for that matter, a jacket to be found. But it would be a mistake to call it a simple collection of sweaters, skirts, and dresses. Quite the opposite. What it was, in fact, was an in-depth exploration of cut and pattern-making, one that showcased Maier's inventiveness on the one hand and his keen appreciation for fit on the other. It was outstanding.Maier said something apparently straightforward but telling at his pre-fall presentation back in December: "It's about putting the color in the right place to make a woman feel good. It's what we're here to do." That rather humble statement applied to what he achieved today, too. Cases in point: He spliced geometric panels of burnt-red leather into the midriff of a black crepe dress, and he boldly arranged the striped swatches of crepe on another dress in ways that subtly shaped the body."Puzzles" was the word he used backstage before the show, and a lot of technical know-how went into these pieces. But the results were as far away from fussy as you can get. That's down to the fact that the silhouettes were understated: sleeveless or long-sleeve, with a little nip at the waist, and a swishy bit of movement in the knee-length skirt courtesy of some pleats. That's it. Only with Maier, a pleat is not necessarily a pleat. A charcoal flannel skirt was painted and beaded trompe l'oeil-style to evoke the pleating effect. Another time he used a zigzag seam below the hips to create the illusion. But real or pretend, there was a genuine sense of comfort here, which was one key to the collection's appeal. It's no small task making dresses that are as unfettered as these but still pack so much graphic energy. Maier did it handily.
21 February 2014
Tomas Maier always looks mildly amused as he absorbs the various impressions of the attendees at his Bottega Veneta shows. All part of life's rich tapestry, as far as he's concerned. Ever cryptic, Maier contributes sparingly to the dialogue. Today, for instance, his word du jour was "casual."Such an easy little word to sum up a collection that was, on the surface at least, as simple as a pair of pull-on track pants. But how disappointing would it be if a Bottega collection was "simple"? Too much effort goes into making these clothes effortless, creating their worn textures, their patina of use. And it's that utilitarian edge that makes them such an anomaly in the world of luxury retailing. Maier likes his clothes to work. He might use suede for a shirt jacket and matching pants, as he did today, but the result still looks like a delivery man's uniform—well, a four-figure version of one.The fact that Maier chose chartreuse for that outfit highlighted his contrariness, another of the designer's signatures. The collection was distinguished by shades of green, a notoriously hard sell for men. And for a silhouette, Maier favored a blouson with an extra-wide ribbed waist, likely to err on the unforgiving side. While such details may not have been as suggestive or evocative as some of his more scintillating efforts, they were nevertheless seeded with the strangeness that makes Bottega so fascinating. In this context, even Beyoncé singing "Superpower" on the soundtrack sounded a little… odd.That's because Maier himself may exude complete control, but he's partial to a sense of chaos bubbling beneath the surface. Here, for instance, dip-dyed knitwear actually looked more stained than anything else. The hems and cuffs of jackets and shirts suggested a similar unhappy accident. An argyle knit slid sideways, like it was being tugged hard. Such clothes hinted at curious incidents in the not-quite-what-it-seems world of Bottega Veneta.
11 January 2014
Some designers are music geeks. Others get off on art. Bottega Veneta designer Tomas Maier's obsession is fabric. He can riff on Japanese mills' superiority to those of France and Italy, and follow that with an explanation of why some polyester is more expensive than silk. A showroom appointment is an education, but what really impresses is what Maier thinks up to do with his beloved fabrics.In the case of a strapless cocktail number made from neon pink and black silk jacquard, guipure lace, and rubberized chiffon topped with a laminated film, it's really no exaggeration to say that he created a material that didn't exist before. As worked as the surface of that party frock was, it didn't look overwrought, and that's another great thing about a Maier dress. Discussing a pair of color-blocked sheaths, he said, "It's about putting the color in the right place to make a woman feel good. That's what we're here to do." Also lovely: an aubergine dress with a single fluttery ruffle, inset with leather, that extended from the left hem up and around the neck to the right shoulder.The SAG and Golden Globe nominations were announced this week. Maier has never courted Hollywood the way other designers have, much to his credit, and nothing about his long-sleeve black dress brushed with gold leaf said "red carpet." Nonetheless, it would strike the precise not-trying-too-hard, but-still-madly-chic note that, if you ask us, actresses should be going for.
11 December 2013
Fabric was the starting point at Tomas Maier's Bottega Veneta show today. Print and color for the most part were pared back, so that his expressive volumes could do the talking. Maier developed a cotton woven with copper; the metal threads gave it a memory. He used it to sculpt mille-feuilles of ruffles that circled the hips of a short skirt, cascaded down the torso of a day dress, and bustled the small of the back on a one-shoulder dress with leather straps. The results felt ladylike, not all that unlike his 1950s-inflected Fall show, but where that was retro-strict, this had a more relaxed spirit. Inevitably, it felt more modern.How ironic, then, to hear from Maier backstage that a visit to the Metropolitan'sImpressionism, Fashion, and Modernityshow was what sent him down this path for Spring. Like the Impressionists, process is paramount to Maier, but as a whole it didn't bog him down. There was a real sense of drama to these clothes, but they had a nice lightness, too. Take the show's signal look: a black wrap skirt with an exuberant flounce at the waist that he paired with a white button-down, its boxy short sleeves turned over with deep cuffs. The crisp shirting was sharp where the ruffles were sweet; those aforementioned leather straps on the dresses had a similar leavening effect. Maier is smart enough to know that if you add, you must also take away.Toward the end of the show, he tried out a few other kinds of embellishment, the most successful of which was the short mohair fringing that accented belted plissé tank dresses. Other numbers, especially one in royal blue with metallic appliqués embroidered in a dégradé effect, looked overly crafty and weighed down. Not all masterpieces, then, but we liked Maier's sense of exploration here.
20 September 2013
The Bottega Veneta show began so earnestly—a man in a gray flannel suit—that it immediately sparked a vision of mid-century Americana. And that initial impression never really let up, because the collection was layered with so many subtle references to the era. The intense graphicism of the scribble stitch on a cream leather blouson or the freehand paint stripes on a cotton tunic wouldn't have looked out of place on the cover of an album from Blue Note, the legendary jazz label. (The finger-poppin' jazzbo soundtrack certainly helped there.) In fact, jazzy cool defined the linear crispness of Tomas Maier's tailoring. But the boxy, wide-sleeved shirts were fresh off the backs of a 1950s bowling league, and windowpane-checked slacks and rollneck knits were all about Rat Pack leisure.All of this was, so far, in keeping with Maier's ongoing exploration of the iconography of the American male. But there was something more interesting, more typically twisted, going on. Maier turned his new collection into a meditation on the process of design. He talked about the way a designer starts with a pencil and paper, makes a sketch, erases, redraws. Almost every item was defined in some way by what looked like a tailor's chalk marks, delineating the outline of a pocket, a lapel. In some cases, the shape of the pocket had been changed radically, but the old outline remained. It was an intriguing way to underscore the fact that, for Maier, Bottega Veneta is still quite literally a work in progress.
22 June 2013
To produce Bottega Veneta's new Cruise shoes—loafers with woven-raffia uppers, brogues with raffia insets, and raffia kitten heels with leather cap toes—Tomas Maier commissioned artisans in Morocco. "We tried to do it in Italy, but…" he threw up his hands, indicating that even the skilled factories in BV's native country didn't know the right techniques in this particular case. To get the raffia supple enough to weave, Maier continued, it must be bathed in oil and water first. "I like being able to display that kind of know-how."It's a detail worth bringing up not only because the shoes are truly fabulous but also because it illuminates the entire Bottega Veneta collection, which once more puts the emphasis on craft. Cotton poplin dresses are embroidered with raw swatches of St. Gallen lace and then block-printed, while A-line frocks are embroidered with fringe, then veiled in a sheer black material, which is further embellished with macramé and swags of silver chain. The real marvel, though, is that the results look so effortless, so exactly like what you want to wear when the weather turns hot. A pair of solid stretch-cotton dresses with only big floppy bows for adornment looked simpler in their execution, but still special.This season's handbag additions include ombré-dyed, soft-construction goatskin city totes and smaller Intrecciato-style bags with hand-painted edges. "No two bags are the same," Maier said. "The client appreciates that." Innovation seems to be the Maier way. Next month he'll unveil a Bottega Veneta shop on Melrose Place in L.A. with an entirely new store concept; it'll be built to resemble nothing more so than a home.
7 May 2013
Wool. Is there a fabric less sexy? Maybe not, but that didn't stop Bottega Veneta's Tomas Maier from going for it this season. Not many designers have the imagination combined with the skill to turn the plain material into something so utterly un-plain. Maier focused on print last season; this exercise in cut and drape was something of a reaction to the romance of that, he said backstage. "I was into wool, and using it in different ways, washing it, bonding it, or felting it to create print." Thus fixated, he sculpted the sleeves of one coat, exposing the seams, and layered and draped the neckline of another like a flower. On dresses, he created volume with different kinds of pleats. If that sounds dry, it wasn't. There was nothing minimal about the trio of slim ivory wool sheaths the designer embroidered with multicolor silks to create the trompe l'oeil prints he was talking about. Another looker of a dress was built up at the hips with a flaring peplum.In the end, Maier used more than just wool, but he treated duchesse satin with the same sculptural hand. An asymmetrical folded and tucked top in saffron paired with full, cropped pants balanced ease and polish—it would make a great going-out outfit. In keeping with that mood, Maier limited his evening options to little black cocktail dresses. The most novel of the bunch was actually a creamy shade of wool flannel densely embroidered in undulating vertical lines of lacquered black raffia. The frock showcased his obsessive attention to detail, yet still came off as effortless. In sum, this wasn't a showstopper of a collection like last season's, but it qualified as a success on its own terms.
22 February 2013
"The clock is ticking," said Tomas Maier after his show for Bottega Veneta this morning. "We're in a fight with time. It's the one thing we can't control." Beating the clock was a staple of suspense in Hollywood's old film noirs, and there was a dark edge in Maier's new collection, ably underpinned by Sebastien Perrin's moody urban soundtrack. It included snatches of dialogue from the movies of John Cassavetes. The men in those films always seemed so clenched and conflicted, and they cast a serious shadow over the Bottega catwalk.But it was a serious chord that Maier wanted to strike. "Back to work, no nonsense," he emphasized. He focused squarely on the tailored suit and coat, the uniform of one subspecies of the working man, stripping away superfluity, keeping the silhouette lean and sharp and the palette monochrome, and concealing details like the buttons on a coat or the zipper on a cardigan. The collection felt somber, almost sinister, as well it might when its tentpoles were charcoal flannel and black leather, and yet there were enough sophisticated Maier flourishes to let in an undertow of decadent playfulness. A sparkling trim of jet on the lapel of an otherwise matte-black evening ensemble, for instance. Or a jolt of salmon pink in the form of a substantial double-breasted suit. Or gillies proposed as an alternative to the solidintrecciatoloafer. Maier understands that idiosyncrasy is the essence of luxury. That's why he was happy to cut a three-piece suit from a phantom plaid that tickled the fancy as the ghost of menswear past.
12 January 2013
Hard to top the 31 gorgeous dresses on the Spring Bottega Veneta runway. Tomas Maier didn't necessarily try. His pre-fall lineup for the label is much wider-ranging. It didn't knock you off your feet with its laser focus, but it was plenty seductive nonetheless.Black and white printed dresses in motifs borrowed from vintage Japanese kimonos were echoes of last season, and other frocks had the same strong-shoulder, nipped-waist, vaguely forties silhouette. They made up a small portion of the offerings on display in the BV showroom. Tailoring was front and center, and it was difficult to resist the precise allure of a double-breasted smoking worn with parachute silk pants. Same goes for a pantsuit with ruffles down the back of the legs that was strict but sensual at the same time. Separates that followed the skinny on top and voluminous on the bottom principle, or vice versa, exhibited Maier's gorgeous color sense. The petal pink of a long double-faced cashmere coat, sweater, and trousers was particularly sublime.The big takeaway was Maier's devotion to materials and his atelier's devotion to craft. Together, they've developed a process to do leather and patent leather on a single garment. More mundanely, perhaps, but no less luxuriously, nearly every garment came double-faced. The idea was particularly compelling on a pencil skirt with a deep slit in the back. At today's presentation, the designer made a point of showing off the inside: not a seam in sight.
11 December 2012
All hail the dress! Tomas Maier lasered intense focus on the silhouette in his brilliant Bottega Veneta show today, cutting forties-style frocks with strong but not hard shoulders and slender, body-loving shapes. In a less accomplished designer's hands, a collection like this one—there were no pants and just one coat among the 33 looks—could prove repetitive, dull. Here each little number looked like a treasure you'd discover in the best vintage shop in the world, but without the dust. The retro stylings of so many Milanese brands this season are not for Maier. Yes, these dresses glanced back at the past, but the cuts were thoroughly modern and the embroideries state-of-the-art. You know a designer has a hit on his hands when more than one woman walks out uttering the same breathless line, "I want every single piece."It was the workmanship that made these dresses so special—they were very obviously labored over but never belabored. Take the day dress worn by Ruby Aldridge, collaged from two different flower prints, the bodice folded and pintucked and the seams, all of them, edged with glossy strips of snakeskin lined with matte bronze studs. It will cost a fortune, but it'll be worth every cent. Same goes for a party dress in a Givernylike floral with wispy, frayed-edge sleeves that was crisscrossed with diagonal lines of gleaming jet lozenges descending into dense clusters at the hem. "It's about making women feel confident," Maier said backstage. Confident—and beautiful. There wasn't a man or woman in the room who wasn't seduced.
21 September 2012
You can get into trouble by reading too much into a designer's motivation, but sometimes the urge is too damn irresistible. Tomas Maier's collection today had a feel for hit-the-road freedom that made you wonder whether it was some kind of wish fulfillment on the designer's part. Though he is notoriously obsessive about every single detail in the burgeoning Bottega empire, maybe even he has moments where he feels that all he's doing is building a better mousetrap. Of course, that's wildly speculative. And anyway, however Maier himself feels about freedom, the way the idea was conveyed today made for a strong, seductive collection.The word he used wasease, which translated into a dozen variations on any garment that men pull over their heads, just about the easiest way to get dressed. So there were echoes of sailor's sweater, fisherman's knit, ethnic tunic, and so on. The key fabric was suede, layered light as cotton in long-over-longer overshirts or plush as velvet in a pullover shirt jacket. Lacing was used rather than buttons. One suede tunic had fringing, a frontier scout flourish. There was some romance in that idea, as there was in fringed booties that could have been nicked from Tonto, an original free spirit. Another top laced at the neck like a sailor shirt but zipped all the way down the back, a suggestively feminine detail that bordered on the fetishistic in this context.But Maier is a past master of that kind of twist. In the same vein, he used what he called "women's fabrics"—silky, sensuous chiffons, organzas, and crepes. When tailoring inserted itself into the parade of unstructured fluidity, one suit was veiled in organza for an inside-out effect. A jacket, sweater, and shirt matched in gauzy layers of floral print. Even the most straightforward jackets were printed with a vestigial, feminine floral, as elusive as a memory. The mix of masculine and feminine, the earthy color palette, the suedes, the lacing, and the hint of hippie gave a good-time West Coast-circa-1970's vibe to the collection that jibed with the personal-freedom subtext. And the soundtrack? Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'," with its poignant lyric "I'm goin' where the sun keeps shinin'." Right behind you, Tomas.
23 June 2012
"I always start with color first," said Tomas Maier, explaining his design process. "Color, then material, then shape." That attention to palette came through in his engaging new cruise collection for Bottega Veneta, which kicked off Resort season here in New York today. Inspired by the frescoes of Tiepolo and Veronese, the designer worked with shades of yellow, peach, and mint green, made all the more intense by the way he showed them top to toe in monochrome looks. The soles of a pair of bow-front pumps, for example, were the same bold shade of peach as their leather uppers, which in turn matched the cashmere double-breasted peacoat and wide-legged trousers.As for materials, Maier looked toward the past and the future. On the one hand, a slim day clutch was made from a type of silk leather that the Italian house used in the seventies; on the other, the label's signature intrecciato bags were woven from a Japanese paper and metal and its large cabat bag from organic black rubber with aluminum embellishments. "If you don't want a leather bag, I don't understand why you want a fake leather bag," he said, and so he sought more original alternatives for the house's usual luscious skins.Maier gets off on the intersection of the artisanal and the high tech, and he was in full control of the mix here. Clingy jersey gowns were fused with tiny beads rather than embroidered, and larger beads were knit directly into the seams of a pair of stretchy black dresses. There were innovations in terms of shape, too. Maier said he was thinking a lot about the weekend issue—as in, what does the BV woman want to wear on her days off? What he came up with was a pair of true-blue color-blocked tracksuits.
9 May 2012
There's been lots of talk about oversize this and exaggerated that so far this season, but Bottega Veneta's Tomas Maier is taking a different tack. "It's usually more flowy," he said in his succinct style backstage, addressing his Fall collection's new close-to-the-body shapes; its dense, opaque fabrics; and the ways in which he used print and embroidery to enhance the figure. Enhance it he did; it's still not too late to ship a black velvet bustier evening gown with Art Nouveau-style boning on the torso to L.A. for the Oscars tomorrow night.Maier opened with strict tailoring: Coat-dresses and suits were marvels of buttoned-up precision, with graphic details at the sides and slightly padded hips that put the accent on nipped and narrowed waists—the New Look again. With the silhouette thus established, Maier touched on curvy day shifts unadorned but for large-scale brooches at the neckline, and sporty, waffle-knit sweaters tossed over peplum blouses.What impressed about the dresses was their range. Printed numbers that riffed on ones that Maier introduced last Fall hugged the body, while others came embellished with shreds of chiffon that looked like dense layers of feathers. A pair of stretch velvet frocks, one with overlapping multicolor flowers and the other with curling black vines à la cut-paper silhouettes, had an almost naïve innocence. But ultimately elegance ruled. Maier's event dresses, which seemed to elongate their models' already exceedingly willowy frames, will get scooped up by celebrities, even if the timing isn't right for the Academy Awards. High marks all around.
24 February 2012
Not unlike his last runway collection, Tomas Maier's pre-fall lineup had a smart, urban look. And not just because the graphic print on a stretch jersey sheath was inspired by the windows of New York skyscrapers at night. Maier has a good sense for what a city girl (one with a hefty bank account, naturally) needs, from that day-to-evening sleeveless dress to a statement coat (it doesn't get bolder than his gold-dipped shearling bomber) to dressed-up yet unfussy tailoring. The best example of that was a suit in espresso brown stretch polyester, one part tuxedo and the other part track pants. A liquid gold evening dress with miles of fabric in its floor-length skirt had a similar sense of ease. There was more gold to be found on the collection's accessories. Your average city girl might not really and truly need a leather clutch with hand-painted metallic edges, but we can think of plenty who'd desire it.
1 February 2012
"There's not much you can do with men," Tomas Maier murmured after his show today. What he meant was that perfectionists like him always have to work round the fundamental physical limitations of torso and limbs. Maier did his best to change the equation a little with his new Bottega Veneta collection. The magic word was "elongation." Everything, skinny ties included, was designed to emphasize verticality. Trousers were laced to a legging leanness. Jackets were cropped to highlight pipe-stem legs heading floorward. Shoes were lengthened, the reasoning being that an extended foot creates the illusion of a longer leg. And boots had stacked heels—not Cuban, not Western, Maier was quick to point out. "I'm just looking to change a man's stance," he added. He could count that effort a success, if the tipped-forward posture of his models was any indication.There is something irrevocably rock 'n' roll about skinny young men tottering around in tight pants and boots. Maier slyly acknowledged that fact when he showed a silvered shearling jacket. Equally, there's something of the male hustler in such a look, so perhaps we could add Maier's midnight cowboy to the list of American archetypes that he has drawn inspiration from over the years.It was nowhere near as easy to parse the interventions that characterized the collection's tailoring. Geometric blocks and strands of color overlaid jackets. "It's the culmination of my fabric treatments," Maier explained, but it felt like a point had been missed. And Tomas Maiernevermisses a point. So it's unlikely that this particular outing will be counted as one of his finest.
14 January 2012
Today's Bottega Veneta show, according to Tomas Maier, was about technology and handicrafts coming together. That puts it in close company with his collection for Spring, but where that one seemed to be rooted in the 1960's, this had its inspiration in the present. "It's urban," he said. Hence the baggy jeans "chalked" to look faded (an unfamiliar sight on a BV runway if ever there was one), which the designer matched with sharp blazers and scarves with long fringe. This collection wasn't so much about elevating streetwear, though, as it was about embracing color (emerald green, violet, orangey red) and a diverse range of surface treatments. It was also a celebration of the dress.Pleating was a big message here, as it has been on many other runways this season (thank you, Madame Grès exhibition in Paris). As much was evident from the first look out, a printed green bustier dress with a plissé skirt. Maier returned to the motif at the end with a series of cocktail dresses embroidered with tucked and folded swaths of stretch mesh. In between, he added a panel of graphic black and white beading to the waistline of a red gabardine number, and tiled the bodice of another with shiny little squares. Less compelling were a pair of shifts appliquéd with clear plastic in such a way that they looked like aprons. To close, there was a parade of glorious chiffon goddess gowns, each one more vibrant than the next.As ever, the handbags were as luxe as it gets, in matte and glazed crocodile or grommeted ostrich skin. A tote in natural lizard was overlaid with intrecciato leather in bright indigo. It was indicative of the kind of experimentation that gave the collection its palpable joie de vivre.
23 September 2011
Anyone who still imagines fashion remains willfully oblivious to current events would probably be surprised to learn that Tomas Maier was inspired by 2011's Arab Spring, when he conceived the latest men's collection for Bottega Veneta. The Arab world's pursuit of democracy got him thinking about the integration of different sartorial traditions in a way that was about genuine synthesis, rather than banal ethnic influences. By the time they reached the catwalk, Maier's creative impulses had been well and truly sublimated. A casual overview might suggest that relatively conventional two-piece tailoring ruled (even if the suits were crumpled). Still, a residue of the Great Elsewhere lingered in the unplaceability of a number of the clothes, neither Middle East nor Midwest, but with an undertow of both. The buttoned-up-tight mandarin-collared jackets and matching pants had a military mien—add sunglasses, a general's cap, and a hundred kilos, and you'd have yourself a best-dressed dictator. That control was contrasted with a shopping list of fabric treatments: washing, creasing, over-printing, over-dyeing, dip-dyeing. Checks were bleared like they'd been hand-blocked. A tweed was really a printed cotton. Just a fashion illusion, but here it poked as much as it pleased.Maier never really lets go. Even the peculiar denim and leather breakout he allowed himself today was pinpoint-precise. Will BV men be thinking of the Arab Spring when they're shopping this time next year? Unlikely. But Maier's abstract inspiration actually did yield a hint of out of control that his customers may find refreshing come Spring 2012.
18 June 2011
The Hitchcock blondes have exited the frame. After Fall's trip back to the sixties, Bottega Veneta's Tomas Maier is in a forward-thinking state of mind for Resort. It doesn't get much fresher than a hot pink silk shirtgown cinched with a corset that looks like it could double as a parachute belt, unless, that is, you're talking about an equally weightless, imminently packable shift in multiple layers of color-blocked chiffon.Ease was an important theme here, as it usually is in Maier's Cruise collections. The man lives part-time in Palm Beach, so he has a good feel for the kind of clothes women want in hot climates, but he juxtaposed softness with city-ready structure. A pair of corseted and boned body-con dresses stood out even though the designer played it cool by teaming them with understated little leather jackets. Another pair of opposites: neutrals and hyper-saturated colors. A simple taupe shift was embellished with turquoise chiffon down its front, and a trim, tan leather coat came accessorized with a red nappa leather tote. Speaking of accessories, the new bags have a lived-in feel. Foil, for example, is inserted between two layers of nappa leather to give the materials a memory. Stiff and lifeless aren't part of Maier's Resort equation.
15 May 2011
The shaggy mohair coat, opaque white hose, and T-strap sandals, not to mention Karolina Kurkova's bouffant-y 'do, suggested that Tomas Maier had something very different in mind from last season's sporty ease at Bottega Veneta. But if the designer's interest in knee-length skirts, trim little cardigans, sleeveless shifts, and sparkling semiprecious jewelry seemed almost Hitchcockian, the clothes were hardly prim. That's because Maier made use of unexpected fabrics—a pilly wool or a densely woven, three-dimensional yarn, say, for a pair of ladylike coats. And not only that, he was also quite adventurous with surface treatments. What at first looked like dust on Abbey Lee Kershaw's sweater vest turned out to be actual tea staining. All right, maybe that's not the most retail-savvy idea, but later on came clever, covetable dresses embellished with lace both real and virtual. (A spray-painting technique created trompe l'oeil lace stencils.) And the experiments didn't end there. The hems of a pair of corset dresses looked as though they'd been put through a paper shredder, swishing back and forth underneath overlays of that same black lace.Backstage, Maier said he hoped the effect of all his work would be like that of looking at stained glass windows in a Gothic church. The way the light filters through and shifts so that you're never quite sure what you're seeing. One thing we do know for sure, the results on the runway were impressive, and in the case of those cocktail dresses, captivating. Hand-painted duchesse satin ball skirts suspended from raw canvas corsets felt perhaps too much like a design school project. Otherwise, though, this was a polished collection from one of fashion's most confident practitioners.
25 February 2011
Coming off a Spring collection in cool shades of chalk, charcoal, and black, Tomas Maier's pre-fall outing forBottega Venetapositively popped with color. There were bold, color-blocked coats and solid silk shifts in vivid primary hues. Even the more fitted sleeveless sheaths in Prince of Wales check were handpainted with subtle washes of color. Cut and construction remain the designer's obsessions. A simple coat, for example, was patchworked together from at least three different fabrics; it almost looked like it had been turned inside out, as if Maier wanted the world to see its meticulous inner workings. If that sounds like a tough sell with some Bottega customers, the latest innovations to theintrecciatobags won't be: Now they're woven with extra fringes of leather. The patent d'Orsay ballet flats Maier showed with everything—short and long, day and night—are no technological feat, but they're worth a mention, as they make a pretty persuasive argument to ditch heels for good.
2 February 2011
The music forBottega Venetatoday featured an ominous David Lynch soundtrack, which amplified the dark, undone mood of the collection. ("Austere," the press notes called it.) Tomas Maier really had another director in mind, though—the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni, who started out in monochrome neorealism before introducing startling Technicolor into his repertoire in the classicRed Desert. That was kind of the order of things with the clothes the designer showed.Maier too started with monochrome: dark wool suits, the fabric textured, distressed-looking, the jacket lapels turned up and doubled by the addition of a lapel scarf; trousers tucked loosely into ankle boots; shirts untucked. The first impression was raw. One jacket zipped open across a horizontal center seam, coming apart. Then came the shots of Technicolor: eye-popping orange-red or gemstone green cords, a bright blue duffel, a trench in that red shade.Maier accepts that the fundamentals of men's fashion don't change that much. "To evolve, you have to reinvent what you already have," he says. One way he does that is by injecting character into his clothes. His men somehow seem like archetypes, never more so than the leather-clad guys who strode down his catwalk today. A washed-leather trench even had a sinister edge. So did an evening jacket in inky velvet. That's Maier's almost cinematic power of suggestion.Something else that Maier understands is desire. In this collection, the lightness, the lack of obvious structure, the way a cardigan might be layered casually over a jacket implied freedom from restrictions of all kinds. And that's the kind of reinvention many men would crave.
15 January 2011
"I don't like making clothes for red-carpet events," Tomas Maier said shortly after his impressive show today. "I like real life." He had demonstrated as much a few minutes earlier. With the noise of street traffic and building construction on Michel Gaubert's soundtrack, the models strode the Bottega Veneta runway wearing sporty, airy clothes in an understated, neutral palette. Their hair was damp and loose, as if they'd just emerged from the shower and hadn't bothered with the blow-dryer, and on their feet were flat leather sandals or peep-toe suede booties. The unmistakable message for Spring: ease.The buoyancy of the opening group—blue-black A-line tank dresses spliced at the shoulders or back with breezy mesh— reminded the crowd that Maier has many years of experience designing swimwear. The roomy, to-the-floor, color-blocked jersey dresses that followed had a similar liquid appeal. The finale dresses—and as advertised, these were dresses, not gowns—were more constructed, but the way the silk was lightly tacked at the seams meant that these, too, floated on the body. The one low point: a couple of numbers in a trapezoidal print weighed down by a surfeit of excess fabric.There was tailoring, as well, but it was soft and weightless. The power suits that had the fashion set raving last season were replaced by relaxed two-piecers. Slouchy in some places and hugging the models in others, they almost looked as if they'd gone through the wash and been turned inside out. The jackets of Maier's shorts suits, meanwhile, were crisp but cut away to expose a flash of back (Milan's hot zone for Spring).As for that signature Bottega Veneta luxe, you saw it in a spare yet indulgent matte crocodile bandeau and vest, and, of course, in theintrecciatobags, some of which appeared to be woven not just with leather or another exotic skin, but also with feathers. Those were an apt visual metaphor for the lightness of Maier's clothes. Effortless is the wrong word; creating such offhand, everyday beauty requires a great deal of exacting work.
24 September 2010
Ry Cooder's music forParis, Texasis practically the loneliest sound in the world. That made it an appropriate intro for Tomas Maier's new collection, in which he imagined a man on a road trip to rediscover a country he'd spent too much time flying over. The scenario offered the designer a golden opportunity to develop his signature blend of the hyper-casual and the super-formal, and he made the most of it.Since Maier's hero would be living out of his car trunk, his shirts were wrinkled and his suits crumpled. And because he would be crossing long stretches of desert, materials for even the outerwear (a nylon parka, a cotton trench) were featherweight. The sand-toned suits that opened the show were cut from bleached classic fabrics patchworked like camouflage or topographic maps, but they were the most urban pieces on display. The utilitarian pieces that followed, in white cotton and washed suedes and leathers, suggested the wardrobe of an explorer. Maier emphasized athleticism with micro-perforated fabrics, sometimes in gussetlike insets used to articulate seams.But things really came into their own with a series of monochrome outfits in maroon, petrol blue, and olive green, especially a coat, pants, top, andintrecciatotote, all in the same military shade. Maier found his models all over the place, from L.A. to B.A. (as in Buenos Aires), and their sensual polymorphousness perfectly suited the road-trip theme—a valuable reminder of how much casting can add to a show.
19 June 2010
If Tomas Maier's Fall collection for Bottega Veneta was an exploration of the power woman's working wardrobe, Cruise is about, well, the power woman on holiday. That isn't to say there weren't some viable options for the city: a couple of slouchy takes on the fantastic double-breasted suits Maier put on the runway in February, for example, or a black sleeveless dress with a fitted rubber bodice and a full leather skirt. But for the most part, this was a leave-the-beach-and-toss-it-on kind of lineup, from a black nylon all-in-one to a magma red draped double-face silk dress to a washed leather jacket on top of sporty shorts. Cut from colorful Lycra, the T-shirts looked like ultrachic rash guards.A relaxed sense of ease extended into evening as well, with a great-looking black tank gown slit up the side to reveal a flash of white fabric underneath. Maier paired it with lace-up gladiator sandals. Most of the shoes in the collection are forgivingly flat, save for an innovative brown suede sock/stacked-heel sandal combo. As for the bags, there's a lot of that all-important "newness," from a rubber bonded suede satchel to a completely seamless woven leather cube-shaped messenger. The hands-down winner, though, was the giant rubberized python tote. It might cost as much as a vacation rental, but that never stopped the Maier client before. Last week, a made-to-order event at the Fifth Avenue store was mobbed with women shopping for five-figure Bottega trophies.
16 May 2010
Many designers in Milan are cogitating about power women—that tricky, oft revisited subject that, unless approached with a questioning intelligence, produces nothing more original than yet another clichéd eighties skirtsuit. But there was nothing stereotypical about Tomas Maier's approach to the matter for Bottega Veneta. He put his thoughts forward in a bold and intense exploration that began with the uncompromising sight of two women in black leather pantsuits—an opener for a strangely paced series of chapters that, unusually in these days of one-message fashion shows, offered a huge sweep of intriguing options.The modernity was in the span of it. This was a collection that had narrow, businesslike tailoring at one end; fluid jersey dresses and sporty parkas in the middle; and then concluded in a blast of candy pink silk. There was a lot to take in that was subtle yet strong—especially in daywear, and in Maier's mastery of fluid asymmetries honed to practical use rather than art for art's sake. The variety—semi-draped dresses, all-in-ones, A-line T-shirt tunics, two brilliantly simple trouser suits, and a couple of teddy-bear coats (a breaking trend)—only added to the overall sense that Maier gets the breadth of women's lives.There was a weirdly pleasing darkness in the undercurrent, and that edged it away from feeling like a service-driven "career" collection. Some of that came from the oddly special molded-wedge boots, or the bags with an iridescent sheen of color inspired by beetle wings, or later the scarabs dangling from necklaces and earrings.True, there was an odd moment too many (buckle-on leather carapace tops for cocktail?), but the full sweep of the evening options more than made up for that. This was an outstanding piece of work that moved forward into ideas fashion too rarely has the wit to touch.
26 February 2010
Pre-fall, for Tomas Maier, is all about ease. Relaxed blanket coats top roomy knit sweaters and dhoti-style pants, and the only suits in the lineup come in softest wide-wale corduroy. His sack dresses, some cut asymmetrically, have an effortless pull-them-on-and-go quality, but not to worry, they're still plenty sexy paired with drop-dead over-the-knee satin wedge-heel boots. In keeping with the designer's karate-inspired Spring collection, there are sporty elements, too, like a suede drawstring-hem parka or a fitted jersey dress with sweatshirt-style raglan sleeves. Pleated frocks with built-in cardigans are his contribution to the season's faux-layered trend. Even the bags have a new slouch about them. Influenced by the vintage Bottega Veneta pieces that have been popping up on eBay these days, Maier added long straps to messenger-style shapes so they can be worn slung across the torso. All around, a very cool collection from this luxe, upper-crust label.
9 February 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
16 January 2010
In a serene and beautifully judged collection done almost entirely in shades of cream, Tomas Maier put the individualistic way we use clothes at the center of his thought process. "I think of it as a collaboration with women," he said. "The clothes are meant to be a backdrop, a blank canvas, so the wearer can play with color and accessories to change the look and make it her own." The concept of the neutral background came when he saw a group of children being dropped off at a karate class in Florida, where he lives: "I liked the look of the canvas, and that became my color card—white, cream, straw. And the idea of the soft belt."The relaxed sportiness surfaced in the second look: the karate jacket, made into a halter and wrapped over shorts, followed by a drapey fine-gauge knit jogging suit and all-in-one. Yet his takes on simple sheaths, strapless dresses, a cotton fifties-flavored sundress, the corset, and an impactful evening dress were all securely melded into the sequence. At the core of the show was an impressive array of daywear that, as Maier promised, became the foil for outstandingly desirable accessories and the occasional splash of turquoise, green, and magenta.Lightweight jackets and rolled-hem shorts, elegant T-shirt-cum-sack dresses, and tunics with asymmetrical raised seaming were shown with a sophisticated Bottega take on country-peasant craftsmanship: high wedge sandals with woven espadrille soles, delicate string macramé slingbacks, and an amazing translation of the house leatherintrecciatobag into something resembling a soft straw basket. It was one of the best summations so far this season of the feeling for sport, pale color, and the textured aesthetics of humble materials—but with a surprise contrarian kicker. At the end, three extraordinary evening dresses in boldly colored iridescent polyester tissue walked out. Nothing to do with the rest of it, except that in Maier's hands, even the synthetic can become the epitome of sophistication.
25 September 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
20 June 2009
Neons at Bottega Veneta? Tomas Maier took a new tack for Cruise, evident not only in the highlighter pink, Kelly green, and turquoise he added to his usual muted, earthy tones but also in the references to athletic gear as well as his own menswear. It made for a lively though characteristically luxe collection, complete with jackets tailored Neapolitan-style with wide lapels and rolled shoulders, sporty napa leather pieces, and pleated silk twill dresses that were a relaxed riff on the finale goddess gowns from Fall. On the accessories front, there were hammered-metal hoop earrings and chunky necklaces, as well as a selection of limited-edition wovenintrecciatobags. One of those comes in taxi yellow and black as a memento of the designer's first trip to New York—a sign that Maier is increasingly unafraid to push himself beyond his comfort zone.
18 May 2009
Tomas Maier's remedy for breaking the downward spiral of depression is irresistible glamour. "With all that's going on, I just switched off the TV news and thought about designing appetizing clothes to make women feel pretty and attractive," he said before the show. "Let's get out of this!" That rallying cry made for possibly his most resolved and beautiful collection yet—gently done, yet spiked with a new undercurrent of eroticism.It began with simple rectangles of cloth—folded into ivory envelope coats or pieced into fluid charmeuse dresses—and then built momentum through perfectly cut sheaths. One number—essentially a single square of black wool with armholes, wrapped to fall in a ruffle in the front while dipping asymmetrically over the shoulder—looked as if it had been wound around Sasha Pivovarova almost spontaneously. Of course, there's more than spareness of cut going on here. The desirabilty is in Maier's fabrics, some of which are so refined even the camera can't pick up the nuances. The second look out—a cream coat over a strapless dress—passed within inches of the noses of the audience, but who knew the coat was covered with a fine layer of organza, or realized the dress was not a matte cotton canvas but leather? Only the woman who wore it, or someone close enough to stroke her. Which is Bottega Veneta's not-for-public-consumption code in a nutshell.And yet: This is a time when even the stealthily wealthy need an extra push to open their finely craftedintrecciatocrocodile purses. That's where drop-dead sex and glamour step in. Lingerie corseting built into the rib section of covered-up jersey dresses, outlining braless breasts, did that in an outrageously classy way. And then came a sequence of pleated goddess dresses, catching the air as the girls swept past. They were superb.
27 February 2009
Quiet luxury—what else?—was the talking point at Bottega Veneta, where the color palette was all muted wines and shades of brown and gray and the silhouettes were mostly easy and off-the-body, but the fabrications were as rich as ever. A caban coat came in quilted napa leather so soft and weightless it practically floated, while an angora tweed dress achieved the near impossible feat of looking chic and feeling as cozy as your favorite old cardigan at the same time. The new Tornabuoni bags add a literal twist to the label's signature woven intrecciato treatment, giving them an interesting 3-D texture. In times like these, a tote like that unequivocally says my credit's still good.
2 February 2009
"It's not a time to be ostentatious with clothes," said Tomas Maier backstage at Bottega Veneta, fingering an artfully faded-out floral-sprigged print on a tea-stained cotton shirtdress. "But our customer has never been like that. And it's not about seasonal dressing anymore—that's gone. People like clothes they can collect and wear for years." Maier's alertness to the sensitivities of our troubled times is part of an emerging picture in Milan. His version of downbeat luxury in muted browns—caramel through dark saffron, copper, and chestnut—is actually no less expensive in the execution of amazing fabric treatments and handcrafted leathers than it's ever been. But intuitive designers cannot help but figure collective anxieties in their work, and something in this collection—albeit at the highest-flown level of sophistication—speaks of the need to hold on to permanent values, to lie low and even, maybe, stay home.That is something of a turnaround for a label aimed at the outgoing high achievers of the world. It wasn't so obvious at the outset, when Maier's minimal leather pinafores, olive-drab jumpsuits, and over-the-head mushroom dresses looked like a quieter version of business as usual. But the second half of the show held the surprise: shirtwaisters and dirndls in fabrics inspired by frayed curtains, antique wallpaper, and furnishings that roused a fleeting but distinct sense of the American prairie, threadbare times, and the colors of the dust bowl.
22 September 2008
Tomas Maier is prone to cryptic commentary about his collections for Bottega Veneta. This season, he attributed the pajama look that opened the show to his distaste for the nudity that he sees in contemporary menswear. He wanted to cover up. (With pajamas? Well, I guess bed is where most men are naked.) Fortunately, Maier's actions were louder than his words. His collection was a master class in desirability and wearability. The quality of timelessness is occasionally evoked in the flibbertigibbet fashion world as a genuine asset, and Maier gets it right just about every time. In this instance, you might say he was trading off the late forties and early fifties—those Bogie-and-Mitchum glory days of confident masculinity—with square-shouldered blazers, full-pleated trousers, and chunky saddle shoes.Maier clearly understands glamour (if George Hurrell had been waiting to take the mannequins' photos as they left the catwalk, I wouldn't have been surprised), but there is nothing retro-heavy about his approach. The lightness of the fabrics and the construction of the clothes see to that. At the same time, thereissomething slightly tongue-in-cheek about what he is doing, and that's what added the vital spice to this collection. Hence a matching jacket and shirt combination in red gingham, or a companion version in blue checks with a blue spotted tie. (Maier also offered a jacket, pants, and shirt in the same shade of army brown as a more measured expression of a way to elongate the silhouette.) And at show's end, when Noah Mills walked out on the catwalk in a white silk-shantung suit with an orchid in his buttonhole, Maier had us at good-bye.
21 June 2008
The fact that a grateful gasp of pleasure can pass through a room at the sight of an amazingly cut peacoat, the collar chicly turned up, over a pair of gray flannel pants says something significant about the state of fashion right now. It came at number 15 in the Bottega Veneta lineup—the defining moment at which it became clear that Tomas Maier's collection was making sense of the hunger for a new kind of simplicity in a quite brilliant way. He did it with tailoring and he did it with a stunning variety of draped and pieced dresses, making one of the season's most convincing arguments yet for a longer line."I wanted something effortless" is the way Maier described his liquid, wrapped jerseys and gauzy wool dresses. "I let the material dictate an elongated line, something that would look as if fabric was just running down the body." Effortless and pulled together it was: dresses, tights, and shoes each shaded in one-color silhouettes taken from the dusk-to-dawn tints of a night sky. One outstanding nude-toned dress could be pulled over the head and simply tied at the hip. Others were constructed from patchworks of compact gray jersey to form cap sleeves and trace the torso. To go with all this, there were gorgeous accessories that underlined the sense of elegant restraint: matte crocodile bags with a fold-over frame top; a new dense, dark suede on the flanks of a handheld tote; perfectly balanced pumps with a sliver of a platform. Totally thought through, beautiful, and wearable, this collection ranks Maier as a designer working at an extraordinary level of technical accomplishment, and sensitivity to the kind of women who wear his clothes.
18 February 2008
Tomas Maier built his new Bottega Veneta collection around the extremes of the male "uniform": utilitywear and eveningwear. In Maier's world, the Maytag Man hangs his coveralls next to a sumptuous set of tails, and the designer treated both with equal attention to the exquisite detail that characterizes his work at BV. One of his reference points was the series of photographs Irving Penn took of London tradesmen in the late forties. "I loved their elegance," Maier said after the show. It was a quality he himself captured in white coveralls a housepainter might wear, which he paired with a tailored navy topcoat. This hybrid notion also emerged in the utilitarian seaming and patch pockets of a gray flannel jacket, and maybe even in the black patent moccasins that were shown with the tuxes in place of evening shoes.Maier described his key proportion as "Charlie Chaplin," a trim tailored top over baggy pants (the sturdy denims were practically pooling on the floor). As the show progressed from the function of workwear to the form of tux or tails, this exaggerated relationship became more acute: Suit jackets in classic pinstripe, windowpane check, and flannel had shoulders that were peak bordering on pagoda. And yet, even when coupled with the full trousers, it was less Chaplin than an icon of unambiguous masculinity like Robert Mitchum that the clothes put one in mind of, an impression compounded by the solid, heavy-soled shoes. We need heroes—and Maier's found one for us.
12 January 2008
Tomas Maier's Bottega Veneta is one exemplary illustration of how the principles of restrained, minimalist, functionalist design—the discipline that's been cast into the shade since the nineties—can not only be relevant for now but, frankly, delicious with it. How so, when a collection is virtually colorless with no overt story to broadcast? It doesn't take a Ph.D. to analyze. Scan the section of flowy, crinkle-creased shirtdresses and goddess draping (how about the gray-green one with the crepe caught into a kind of garland in the neckline?), and you'd need a heart of stone not to think,There goes something gorgeous.Backstage, Maier described the collection as a balance between "rigor and anarchy," imagined along the attenuated lines of a Giacometti sculpture with a side thought for the attitude of Madame Grès, "except loosened, and then I pinned and tucked the pleating on each girl irregularly, just where the body asks for it." More importantly, as a Miami-dwelling world traveler, the German-born Maier understands summer dressing. He knows where his women are going in his clothes (airplane, work, dinner) and how to make such things as a spare shift or a pragmatic trench elegant. Maier's expertise as a swimwear designer also leads him to design from the inside out, so he will automatically—and considerately—build an invisible holding under-layer into his breezy transparencies. It's doable, believable, and, if you have the funds, eminently buyable. Credit Maier for the fact that the clothes are now vying with the accessories for attention in this luxury house founded on woven leather goods (for the update on those, check the wedges and the oxidized-leather belts and bags).
24 September 2007
Everyone had a front-row seat at Bottega Veneta's resort presentation. Designer Tomas Maier opted out of a show and instead went digital, sending editors a DVD of his highly focused and beautifully executed collection. African inspiration was evident in his use of wood bead embroidery, ethnic prints, and muted colors. Cartridge pleats at the neck and cuffs added texture, as did a new, intricate cording technique that was used on the bodice of warrior-worthy dresses, as well as accessories. For the urban adventurer, there were sporty separates in crisp silk taffeta.
25 June 2007
There's often a hint of irony in Tomas Maier's collections for Bottega Veneta. This season, washed-out madras items, monochrome ensembles in pale peach (here called "lotus") and orange ("aurora")—even the butterfly-embroidered swimsuit Maier usually shows—suggested a quirky take on a preppy Palm Beach story. It's curious that a designer who is so devoted to the finest craftsmanship in clothing should make such a strong showing in spring, more so than in the fall (when logic dictates that a creative mind would have more to work with), but the simpler, lighter needs of summer seem to suit Maier's own tastes best. The man has, after all, elected to live in Miami.So his palette was sun-faded, his fabrics were washed-out, and his silhouette had an almost slouchy ease. With comfort as a priority, casual jackets had zip-off sleeves and detachable collars. After last summer's essentially monochrome white collection, Maier thought of his custom-made madras as a print for spring 2008. He combined different varieties of it in a jacket, shirt, and pant combo. But for all this summery ease, the designer is still absorbed in and challenged by the construction of clothes. His suits, with their little peaked shoulders, carried over the influence of the Neapolitan tailoring from BV's fall collection, especially a final three-piece group in dully gleaming ramie. Echoing Luca Missoni's aqua-infused spring effort, Maier said he was thinking about David Hockney's fusion of formal and sportswear during his "Splash" period in California in the late sixties. Sunny, but seriously smart.
23 June 2007
With careful, virtually noiseless steps, Tomas Maier has moved up on the outside of fashion to give renewed credibility to that overused and downgraded term,luxury. If genuine luxury resides in out-of-the-ordinary things crafted with an intimate understanding of a life attainable only by the few, then Bottega Veneta could well stand as its contemporary definition. Crucially, Maier's point of view values the personal over the trendily available. His central principle, that "clothes are a means of expression, not an end in themselves," means he has in his sights a woman who likes to look like a woman—curvaceous, individualistic, and beautifully grown-up.It was there from the start today in the quiet but impactful glamour that picked up on a vaguely forties silhouette via a built-out shoulder folded into a cap sleeve that drew attention to a narrow, sometimes corseted torso, which then flared outward to the skirt. It's a way of treating suits and coats with details that rise above retro—say, a sprouting of blanket fringing on a layered skirt or shoulder, a puffy pocket on a jacket, or a bloused curve caught in the small of the back of a coat.The eveningwear was just as good, and, at points, charged with an elegant eroticism, worked through satin bra tops and then three stunning black columns topped with flesh-colored crepe chiffon (quadruple-layered to ensure modesty). Overall, the achievement was that Bottega's ultraluxe ready-to-wear is seeming less and less like a background foil for its founding leather goods. Even so, Maier is steadily moving the signature bags onward and upward. Among the new soft hobos and hard clutches, the classic soft woven tote is still there, but it now comes in tinted lizard. The company notes that prices reaching $75,000 do not deter collectors, and given Maier's insight into such customers—who will likely fall for a multistrapped python sandal and a pair of pavé-set diamond bobble earrings without a second thought—it seems the designer can hardly put a foot wrong.
19 February 2007
Tomas Maier's technical accomplishments at Bottega Veneta are all the more spectacular for being so subtle. This season, his obsession with the craft of clothing saw him apply his trademark "barely there" construction to the formal foundations of the finest Neapolitan tailoring—no mean challenge! But the very first outfit, a three-piece suit with peaked shoulders, deep vents, and a trim double-breasted waistcoat, was a confident assertion of success, and that sharp, hypertailored silhouette set the tone for the rest of the collection. Even the most casual elements—denim jackets, for instance—were tailored to the nth. "A tidy silhouette keeps you upright," declared the designer. Something about the way he said that suggested he might also have moral rectitude in mind, which would possibly account for the appearance of a green loden coat, a stolid style stalwart of the Mitteleuropa bourgeoisie. The layers of gray flannel were also a sobering option.But Maier is perfectly capable of countering any tendency toward the straitlaced with his instinct for sheer, unadulterated luxury, present here in ribbed cashmeres, a jacket in BV's signature Intrecciato weave, and accessories that included a budget-busting duffel in honey-toned Madagascar crocodile. The designer also added a hit of rock 'n' roll flash with a trim little jacket in glazed python, making one wonder just what the bowler-hatted BV man gets up to at night.
14 January 2007
It's a tall order to stand out as a voice that champions understated luxury and a complete look aimed at grown women. But, season by season, Tomas Maier has been building an impressive following at Bottega Veneta by doing just that. The designer's spring show worked beautifully as a stripped-down statement of what he has to offer: a subtle beige-through-rose palette, ease aligned with elegance, and stunning detail in close-up.Maier's first papery trenchdress hit a sophisticated note; it was a look that drew attention to the all-important accessories: the soft, woven leather bags and high sandals that—with no need for extra doodads or trendy hardware—are the mark of quality that speaks for this house. From there, the show built, developing into a great collection of refined dresses. A couple of them revisited the tight-bodiced, molded-hip silhouette of Maier's last season, now detailed with tiny lines of vertical stitching or abstract quilting, and done up at the back with hook-and-eye fastenings. Better still, the designer followed through with a sequence of short plissé goddess dresses and liquid jersey numbers, some sexily suspended from plaited straps in back.For a finale, Maier gave himself the task of thinking new sense into a summer evening gown. For a balmy midsummer night's party on the rolling lawn of somebody's estate, what could be more perfect than a billowy, ticking-stripe shirtdress and a pair of flat sandals? The fact that Maier conjured up an exact picture of his customer, and where she might wear his clothes, is a testament to his growing success.
25 September 2006
In the past, Tomas Maier has curiously tried to steer away from any connotations of sex appeal in his clothes. After this collection, he can run, but he can't hide, because there was steam heat in these outfits. But what do you expect when you namecheck Burt Reynolds in all his matte-chested glory as the presiding spirit of your show? Back in the day, Burt knew how to rock a leisure suit, and it was the ease and convenience of that archetypal seventies look that Maier was attempting to channel for spring 2007. His challenge: How can you get away with wearing nothing under a jacket? His solution: a combo shirt-jacket inspired by that leisure suit. In laundered white linen, it already looked like next summer's essential.Maier also laundered the newness out of everything else in the collection, so that colors were sun-bleached and fabrics had a worn, papery look. It's a bold move with clothes this expensive, but it's already become a BV signature. And a sense of the familiar is something Maier is adamant about maintaining, so that men have time to understand and absorb his proposals. That's why the shrunken, cropped jacket reappeared.The use of random numbers as decoration was a new element, however. In the era ofLost, cryptic numerals have acquired a whole new weight, but Maier claimed he was merely fascinated by the graphics of an old typewriter. For that we can presumably credit the same resolutely cerebral side of his character that, amid the casual sensuality of the rest of his clothes, produced two items unlikely to get the wearer any action: a Peter Pan-collared shirt and a primly high-buttoning cardigan.
26 June 2006
Tomas Maier's version of twenty-first-century no-logo stealth-wealth is proving a runaway success at Bottega Veneta. The evidence of that has always been easy to spot in stores (where the pliable woven surfaces of his ultraluxurious handcrafted bags are obvious to the eye and touch), and in the exponentially expanding bottom line of the BV profit sheet. For the first few seasons, though, Maier's quiet message didn't quite carry to the runway. But his initial awkwardness with the concept of managing a top-to-toe look is, with this collection, showing signs of disappearing.Maier's growing self-confidence has helped him relax into what he's best at: pared-down clothes whose cut and fabric speak for themselves. "There's no embellishment, no fur, no embroidery," he said. In a season of gray jersey and pantsuits, he was on home territory. He sculpted the former into two ultraprecise multiseamed day dresses, and two short draped goddess gowns for evening. Unlined neat jackets and wide pants, meanwhile, were treated to a turn in the washing machine to produce a luxuriously rumpled effect. Those were followed by shadow-painted plaid kilts with a sparkle in the pleats, and matching jackets—yet more items on the checklist of interesting pieces for Bottega's moneyed customers to inspect, come fall.The kicker is that Maier is investing plenty of decorative punch in his accessories. It's a smart move that reflects the way most women actually dress today, and double-smart for a house that knows its customer's insatiable hunger for unique, hard-to-identify, and extremely expensive items. To that end, the Bottega woven bags now come with flowers sprouting from the interstices, and are framed with brass hardware featuring Fabergé-inspired engravings. This season also sees the launch of Bottega Veneta fine jewelry, a collection that includes intricately braided chains made of 18-karat yellow and white gold, cuffs, and charm bracelets that up the luxury ante in a way that will no doubt delight the high-spenders Maier already has in his thrall.
20 February 2006
There is something reassuring about Tomas Maier's seductive evolution of Bottega Veneta. As expensive (often headspinningly so) as these clothes are, there is so little that is nouveau about them that they seem to underscore the old-fashioned idea that wealth should be displayed discreetly. "I love a beautifully made product but I hate things looking new," said Maier after his presentation. "They're missing personality."There was certainly plenty of character in these clothes, starting with the fabrics. They were luxe but worn, so that Maier's signature soft tailoring molded to the body. The most eye-catching piece was a jacket in leaf-green tartan that had been dyed, washed, resized, and hand-painted. There was quieter appeal in washed leathers, flannels, and piece-dyed moleskin.New this season was a more formal edge. Maier likes what he calls "the nonchalant innocence" of young men in ties who've never worn them before. Paired with the soft brogues and the handmade, hand-painted porkpie hats that accessorized the collection, the collars and ties, slightly shrunken jackets, and trousers with narrow cuffs evoked Jack Lemmon in the pre-lapsarian sixties moment before America let it all hang out.The bags that are Bottega's bread and butter ran a wide, curious, but covetable gamut: a duffel bag in ostrich dyed orange, a carpet bag in antique velvet, and totes in the label's classic woven intrecciato and Madagascar crocodile (which Maier loves for its big, rough scales and naturally worn brown tone).
22 January 2006
Tomas Maier has lightened up: There's a spring in the step of his girls and a lot of hair-flicking going on (theirs, not his). The silhouette—nipped at the waist with a wide silver-embellished velvet belt swirling to a flared skirt above antiqued-leather T-strap stilettoes—added to the summery swing of a collection of mixed influences, from the bold strokes of American color-field painting to a luxury-filtered version of Mexicana.Maier is a born modernist, interested in function and fanatical about detail, and not the kind of designer to be dogmatic about his look. "I see all of this as a suggestion," he said. "Because you have to do it in your own way." The pieces he's producing for Bottega Veneta—tobacco-brown blazers, tawny suede duster coats, and each one of the complex bags—need to be picked up, stroked, and inspected inside and out to be fully appreciated. That makes all the whisking past of Bottega's bags—in lemon velvet, exotic reptile, and tortoise shell, or a variation of the house woven leather in bright flashes of color—a frustrating business. And that's the dilemma.Maier isn't working in a run-of-the-mill ready-to-wear house that needs to shout to be heard. The steep upward trajectory of the company's sales figures is attributable to a new, discreet pattern of buying among women who collect precious things in a personal way—not least because they haven't been part of the brash overexposure of regular runway news-making. The value of Bottega Veneta can only be truly expressed in a close-up, tactile presentation. Can Maier invent a better way to do his work justice?
27 September 2005
Bottega Veneta has enjoyed spectacular sales at a recent series of transatlantic trunk shows, suggesting that Tomas Maier may have licked one of fashion's most persistent problems. Price resistance? Pshaw! In his Milan showroom, the designer displayed, among other things, a $400,000 set of "herb-dyed" crocodile luggage. The artisanal detail is typical of Maier's work for BV, and other similar touches were evident throughout: the cotton lining in a pair of shoes made of velvet-soft perforated kid; the sterling-silver stitching on a tote; or the lizard engraved on the sole of a flip-flop. Sometimes, the strongest status symbol is one that no one else can see.After an austere fall, Maier was looking for some sunshine and light, and he cited the primary-hued optimism of the color-field painters—Stella, Kelly, Rothko—as his inspiration. The artist's hand was obvious in stripes hand-painted on vintage leather bags or printed on a white cashmere vest. The effortless smartness of the collection was defined by a series of cotton-poplin jackets. Unlined but tailored, they were a little shrunken ("to elongate the legs" claimed Maier), and added a slightly twisted edge to the buoyant preppiness of striped shirts and white jeans. BV's trademarkintrecciatowoven leather was used to trim the pockets of Maier's new denims—and to adorn a steering wheel cover for the man who insists on maximum coordination.
10 July 2005
It used to be that fashion labels would gradually boost their sales by adding bags to their repertoires. Bottega Veneta is reversing that old order. It already has the wildly successful bags, to which it's added a small selection of clothes; for fall, the ultraluxurious Italian leather-goods company presented its first full, day-through-evening collection.What kind of top-to-toe look works for the many women addicted to Bottega Veneta's soft, intricately handmade wares? The answer for day, according to designer Tomas Maier, is a restrained, slick city silhouette of belted shearlings, neat suits, and fit-and-flare gray tweed coats, followed up with easy full-skirt jersey dresses, sheer sweaters, and chiffon kilts. He left plenty of time to admire the bags, with their leather flower appliqués and the steep Spiga loafers embedded with Bottega's signature wovenintrecciatoin the toe.The problems came when Maier moved into a long parade of eveningwear. He certainly has an eye for a seductive evening item—whether that be a velvet knee boot with a flower-painted stacked heel, a high twenties sandal, a tiny silver stingray pochette, or a horde of jeweled wooden bangles. But when it came to the credibility-straining, vaguely caftan-inspired velvet pieces and jersey dresses—well, compared to the bags, shoes, and jewelry, they couldn't help but seem like accessories after the fact.
20 February 2005
Tomas Maier put an unexpected crimp in a trying day during Milan Fashion Week, choosing an inconvenient location and an odd organization for his Bottega Veneta presentation. As models strolled a continuous runway loop, the audience was expected to walk through taking notes—creating visibility problems and a general sense of confusion, for an already harried crowd.Bottega Veneta is certainly not the first Italian leather-goods company to aim at building a ready-to-wear business, but this hybrid solution (was it a bag exhibition or a fully fledged fashion show?) didn't work. The bags, of course, are Meier's strongest suit. This season, the notable updates are gilded versions of the signature woven leathers and a red-and-white checkered bag on a red plastic chain. They were toted by models wearing Maier's idea of luxe sportswear for the superrich traveler. That means simple sportswear—beige raincoat, wide-leg pant, acid-yellow zipper top, and flats. Or beige jersey shirtdresses with a flare in the skirt. He jazzed that up by bringing in a gold leather blazer and coat, wrists full of gold bangles, and necklaces in the form of lanyards dangling gold hardware. Later in the parade, printed smocks, patchwork peasant dirndls, and blue-and-red sundresses appeared. Shown this way, it was hard to give Bottega's quality and detail the close inspection it deserves, much less understand the collection's coherence. That's a pity, and in the trajectory of this brand's success, it's something that needs to be resolved for next season.
27 September 2004
In the nearly three years since Tomas Maier took over at Bottega Veneta, he's been inching methodically forward—from explaining the intricacies of the house bags and accessories to developing a full-fledged clothing line to go with them. What began as a few luxe sporty sweaters and jackets kept on a rack in the back is now a 60-piece collection, which Maier presented on models clustered on a series of podiums in the company showroom. "It isn't like normal ready-to-wear," Maier explained. "I had the concept of designing clothes like accessories. Everyone has their own personality, and will pick things out to wear in their own way."Maier's aesthetic is clean and ageless in spirit, with luxury worked in as a result of the extraordinary handcraft that goes into producing exclusive fabrics, prints, and finishes. He used salt-and-pepper baby tweed for coats, tunics, and pants; cashmere for double-layered cardigan coats in beige and chartreuse; and Deco-derived swirly and geometric prints for A-line skirts and drop-waisted dresses. The effect was feminine and modern, but it was still the accessories that kept the audience circling for a closer look. Most want-able are the new bags: a multicolored Mondrian-esque weave, a framed croc in poison green reissued from the sixties, and the chunky, rounded minaudières studded with tiger's-eye.
23 February 2004
Bottega Veneta creative director Laura Moltedo officially appointed British newcomer Giles Deacon designer of the well-known leather label this season. With this move, and after having been recently purchased by the Gucci conglomerate, Bottega Veneta is undergoing a major face-lift that could lead to a completely new identity.Deacon made no bones about the house's shift in direction. Weathered, zippered and extra-wide jeans opened the show, followed by tiny miniskirts slashed with zippers and funky jackets with flashy metallic fastenings. A leather puffy jacket was drop-dead cool; the same can be said of a woven-leather overcoat and a couple of black corduroy suits with leather shoulder insets. A series of green-and-yellow logo looks was not as successful; but on the whole, Deacon established a strong, dramatic image that is sure to put the spotlight on Bottega Veneta.
4 March 2001
London street-smarts met Milanese opulence at Bottega Veneta in what was one of the most hard-core, tough-cool collections of the week.Any hint of dowdiness from the past is gone for good at Bottega. Designer Laura Moltedo and stylist Katie Grand moved forward at breakneck speed with black, hot pink and orange big-collared leather dresses, gathered skirts and knit-leather silver jackets. The music blared as a tribe of punky girls stormed the catwalk wearing one-shoulder tops, fluorescent green-and- orange leopard-print pantsuits, leather-paillette tank dresses with a buckle strap, and oversize sweatshirt tops.How to accessorize the hard chic-chick look? With enormous sunglasses, woven leather pumps and graffiti-sprayed oversize clutches, of course.
5 October 2000
“Irresistible Bitch” was the soundtrack at Bottega Veneta, summing up the unabashedly rich, attitude-drenched spirit of the collection. Head-to-toe ski chalet outfits—picture a Bond girl on vacation in Cortina d’Ampezzo—included tan napa jackets and skirts, angora neck cuffs, knee-high boots and matching oversized bags. The ’70s-inspired feeling of irrepressible luxury also extended to several sexy silk-denim looks, as well as plush sheepskin coats, woven leather tops and shiny crocodile clutches and belts. Cashmere legwarmers, fingerless gloves and fuzzy angora short shorts completed the look.
7 February 2000
Bottega Veneta showed a line of simple, easygoing separates, including shimmery coral tops, ecru leather pantsuits and beaded cardigans. But in keeping with the luxury leather house's roots, the true stars of the show were their signature handbags, which came down the runway with nearly every outfit. There were oversized carry-alls, simple clutches, and large, square hard cases in sophisticated taupe as well as spring's essential colors: lime green and pink.
12 September 1999