Louise Trotter’s sophomore offering for Bottega Veneta is a hallmark feat, an outstanding exercise in pushing for artistry in an industry where clothing has been designed for the digital spheres, without any lack of considerations for humans. It seems ironic, doesn’t it? The fashion industry designs without the consensus of the humans but rather, the optics of it. This relentless force of optics-driven fashion has given us a steady flow of bread and circuses for the masses to enjoy. Social media clicks, engagement farms, Looks and pieces made for ragebait — all that kind of sort.
But within the fashionsphere, there exists an outlier: with the early foundations of the brand built up by Daniel Lee (who’s now successfully at Burberry), followed by Matthiew Blazy (who’s now successfully at Chanel), Trotter is the third iteration to the New, New, New Bottega. She isn’t tasked with living up to her predecessor’s shadows. Her job is simply to extend a momentum that has been set in motion since 2018.
And so far, it’s paid off. Craft is the new circus. In a sea of phone-lit, discourse-chasing, thread-quipped brands clawing for our attention, what if craft took precedence once again? Forget the spectacle, the derelict, psuedo-intellectual exercises we’ve been tasked to handle time and time and again. Trotter’s deliverables are simply to produce clothes that feel and look good.
Look 1 of 80 (Yes, 80) opens up with an oversized black blazer coat and immediately establishes to us the silhouettes that Trotter will be championing throughout her tenure. While her Kering counterpart Demna went from XL-sized to skintight just two nights ago at Gucci, Trotter fills that now empty spot with scale and larger-than-life silhouettes — from voluminous coats in varying textiles and materialisations such as recycled fiberglass, to giant wrap skirts in their classic Intrecciato weave, to having each model come down the runway donning an appropriate matching beanie.
From the very first glimpse, it’s clear a Bottega show doesn’t behave like any other. It is in the way the clothes move, the sheen of light reflected from the leather, the obsessive intricacies of the leatherwork showcased in the bags, accessories, and clothes. What the Bottega Veneta show manages to achieve in pure, uninterrupted devotion to craftsmanship has paid off with how well received the collection was amongst critics and the public since her debut a few months ago.
Trotter was inspired by the “Brutalism and sensuality” of Milan, where she’s lived since the beginning of her tenure. While most designers can’t seem to shy away from the addictiveness of Italian sprezzatura, Trotter’s drawn inspiration from the Milanese cityscape proves an even more enduring and compelling story for her sophomore instalment. Material admiration in the urbanscape manifests itself into another subset of material production, in this case, its fashion. It’s most evident in how Trotter deploys the Intrecciato weave in her more structured looks, like the first few structured blazer looks or a black leather trench coat that almost looked like a mimicry of panelled concrete from afar. Sensuality seeps its way in with pieces like the house’s take on a Mongolian wool coat.
Trotter’s eye for tactility and texture contrasts the flatness of the digital landscape in which it lands in our periphery. The most alluring aspect of this era of Bottega is exactly that — the garments can flow and move beautifully, look plump and voluminous on the screen, but it will never amount to seeing them in real life.
Ultimately, Louise Trotter’s Bottega Veneta reminds us of something almost unfashionable and idiosyncratic in today’s climate: that clothes are meant to exist in the real world. Not as screenshots, or thinkpieces, or discourse, or algorithm-engineered spectacles, but as objects of weight and temporality. This new chapter of Bottega proposes a far simpler manifesto than its peers: perhaps the clothes are spectacle themselves.
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