It may or may not have been a premeditated gesture, but the white T-shirt and jeans with which Kate Moss opened the first Matthiew Blazy show for Bottega Veneta, which were not made with cotton or denim but with leather, marked a new direction for the signature. One that moved away from the path set by his predecessor, Daniel Lee, who between 2018 and 2021 based his image on an unmistakable tone of green and hyper-recognizable bags and shoes. Since the arrival of Blazy, everyone looks at Bottega for different reasons.
Straddling tradition and modernity, the house maintains the high quality standards that it has applied since its creation. Established in Vicenza in 1966 by Michele Taddei and Renzo Zengiaro, the former handed over control in the late 1970s to his ex-wife Laura Braggion (she would later bear the surname of her second husband, Vittorio Moltedo, with whom he ran the firm until the Gucci Group bought it in 2001, shortly after Taddei left the company. Braggion lived in New York and was part of the circle of Warhol, who in 1985 made the short Bottega Veneta Industrial Videotape. So, from the beginning, the house has been supported by two pillars: artisanal quality and art. Matthiew Blazy seems to want to show that both are the same thing. “When we create bags, we talk about days, not hours,” says an artisan from the Montebello workshop in Craft in Motion, a project created to highlight the importance of the hands of those who work there.
Instead of designing one-season icons, he and his team work on collections that last, and his buyers can rest assured they're shopping forever. They shave skin to reduce thickness and make it easier for the wearer, or they create garments structured through the construction of their parts instead of the weight of their materials, so that nothing is what it seems. It is possible that the secret to success is as simple as it is complicated and consists of just doing things your way.
