Matthieu Blazy presents the Bottega Veneta winter 2023 collection in Milan. This is the third and final installment of Blazy's 'Italia' trilogy of shows. VIP guests include Afrodeutsche, Alvaro Barrington, Amber Kuo, Bambii, Dave, Ilona Staller, Kelela, Marracash, Mathilda de Angelis, Mustafa The Poet, RM, Sagg Napoli, Salma Hayek, Valentina Belle, Vegyn, Yusra Mardini.
Front Row
Collection Notes
A parade: The alchemy of the street is in the difference; who will you meet? What is around the corner? Who will amaze you? It is the surprise of the encounter that has importance.
Bringing to a close his ‘Italia’ trilogy of shows, creative director Matthieu Blazy continues to celebrate and conflate the country's past, present, and future with craft in motion. In this parade, techniques, motifs, characters, and creatures from the past travel through space and time to speak to the present and the future.
Boccioni
A cacophony of influences, both animate and inanimate, becomes a polyphony. Each has its place and is part of the proceedings: from ancient Roman bronze runners (1BC); to Boccioni’s Futurist ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’ (1913); to today’s collection for Winter 2023 that at times draws from both the mythology of antiquity and Futurism’s shape of things to come – quite literally in the cutting of ‘Boccioni’ silhouettes, present from Blazy’s foundation collection and expanded upon here.
The cast's odyssey continues, yet they are now character archetypes in transformation, mutable and moving, traveling from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Showspace & Runners
There is a question of what it means to be chic and when it starts. From the morning ritual of the bombshell in her transparent white chemise and bed socks (that dress belies its material complexity while those socks are knitted leather shoes) to the sartorially obsessed industrialist in his pinstriped nightshirt or ‘grey flannel’ pajamas (all fully realized in Nappa leather).
There is an exploration of the idea of ‘getting changed’ from its everyday meaning in the early silhouettes to its fantastical promises later on, where a new mythology takes shape.
The Parade
The parade is a place of priests and playboys, sleepwalkers, and streetwalkers with sirens of the screen and the ancient seas. Above all, it is a place where there is the joyful, emotional, and personal pleasure of dressing up, of gaining the confidence to be whoever the wearer wants to be through clothing. Here, craft is reconfigured as innovation, with historical silhouettes revived and reinvented, scooped, boned, slit, and suspended. Botticelli’s Chloris and Flora from ‘Primavera’ (c1482) are reconfigured for today. The intricate silk hand embroideries were recreated and rearranged, a new turning of their metamorphosis.
The Unfolding of Possibility
The collection and show are treated like a game of Exquisite Corpse, with possibilities unfolding. Chimerical creatures emerge, transformed through cut and craft, a splicing of codes of volume and technique, shaggy fil coupe jacquards, and the Intreccio take the form of a new kind of skin, becoming cascading scales and feathers, finding new configurations in clothing and leather goods. Murano glass gains added malleability as a medium, clutched by these new creatures when applied as the translucent handles of Sardine bags. It points to the end of one part of the Bottega Veneta story and the beginning of another, of a new mythology.
I loved the idea of the parade in Italy; a procession, a strange carnival, a crowd of people from anywhere and everywhere and yet somehow, they all fit and go in the same direction. I wanted to look at what makes people gather together in a place without hierarchy, where everyone is invited.
Bottega Veneta Winter 23 Details
Collection
