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 show’s 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 kind of 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 coupé 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 were 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; amidst all the intersecting crises, the understandable tendency among designers and their executives is to play it safe. As we’ve seen so far this season, that can lead to samey 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 multicolor intrecciato weave.
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