“I like that the ‘Bottega’ is a workshop – one with a long and multifaceted history in Italy. It involves the collective effort of craft; with craftsmanship, the people who make it, and the people who wear it matter. It’s where the hand and the heart become one.” Louise Trotter
To return to the beginning to find the present. The journey of creative director Louise Trotter and her debut collection begins with the beginnings of Bottega Veneta.
The extravagance of Venice; the energy of New York; the essentialism of Milan. All provide meeting and departure points for the collection and the story of the house itself, mirroring its journey and that of Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Yet it is the revolutionary ‘soft functionality’ of the original Intrecciato applied to bags, developed by cofounder Renzo Zengiaro, that abounds and unites the collection in its entirety, from the extravagant to the everyday, from clothing to accessories. Malleable and mouldable, the classic scale of 9mm/12mm is returned to with styles reconfigured for now, while the spirit of soft functionality infuses all.
In the collection, the romance of process is embraced, from meticulous attention to detail to the purposeful unravelling of classicism in clothing. Techniques and materials are transposed, with the sartorial informing all. Summer-weight tailoring fabrics proliferate, while from Nappa leather trench coats to cotton-lining evening gowns, internal structures matter, each instilled with the discipline and ease of traditional men’s tailoring. Both women’s and men’s clothing is produced in the factories and workshops that are the preserves of the Italian masculine tailoring tradition, with all the accompanying rigour, functionality, and fine detailing requisite in that world applied to both sexes.
The bags of the collection reflect a stratification of the house’s histories. Classic styles are revivified and reborn: the Lauren is found in new proportions; the Knot now embraces a soft structure; the Cabat can be cut away to form a clutch, while its triangular underpinnings inform the collection clothing’s shoulder constructions. These temporal design shifts, together with transposed techniques, also inform new offerings such as the Squash, the elongated Framed Tote, and the Crafty Basket – a tour de force of artisanal skills.
Founded in 1966, 2026 sees the 60th anniversary of Bottega Veneta. With this in mind, Louise Trotter approached the British artist and Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen to work on the soundtrack of the show. The result is ’66 – ’76, an audio artwork featuring Nina Simone and David Bowie, whose respective recordings of Wild Is the Wind, are reconfigured by the artist to form a ‘duet’ and something of an aural Intrecciato. As McQueen says: “You hear those beautiful voices interlocking, it’s putting things which are complementary but different together to make something brand new.”
And as Louise Trotter puts it: “The language of Bottega Veneta is Intrecciato. And it is a metaphor. It is two different strips woven together that become stronger – the two things make a stronger whole. Collaboration and connectivity run throughout this house and its history, from its beginnings to what it is now. It’s about different places, different people, male and female – individual parts and stories intertwined to make a stronger whole.”
