Wrapping up his trilogy of ‘Italia’ shows, creative director Matthieu Blazy continues to celebrate and blend the country’s past, present and future with craftsmanship in motion. In this show, techniques, motifs, characters and creatures from the past travel through space and time to speak to the present and the future.
A cacophony of influences, both animate and inanimate, becomes a polyphony. Each has its place and is part of the process: from the ancient Roman bronze corridors (1 BC); to the Futurist ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’ or ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’ (1913) by Boccioni; even for the current Winter 2023 collection, which at times draws on both the mythologies of antiquity and futurism of what’s to come – literally in the cut of ‘Boccioni’ silhouettes, present in Blazy’s foundation collection and expanded here.
The cast’s odyssey continues, but now they are archetypes of changing characters, shifting and moving, traveling from the ordinary to the extraordinary. There is a question about what it is to be chic and when it starts.
From the morning ritual of the sexy woman (bombshell) in her sheer white shirt and bed socks (this dress hides her material complexity, while those socks are knitted leather shoes) to the sartorially obsessed industrialist in his striped nightshirt or pajamas of ‘grey flannel’ (all fully realized in Nappa leather).
There is an exploration of the idea of “transforming” from its everyday meaning in early silhouettes to its more fantastical promises later on, where a new mythology takes shape. The parade is a place of priests and playboys, sleepwalkers and whores with sirens of canvas and ancient seas.
Above all, it is a place where there is the joyful, emotional and personal pleasure of dressing, of gaining the confidence to be who you want to be through clothing.
Here, craftsmanship is reconfigured as innovation, with historic silhouettes revived and reinvented, hollowed out, boned, cut and suspended. Botticelli’s Chloris and Flora from ‘Primavera’ (c1482) are reconfigured for today. The intricate handmade silk embroidery has been recreated and rearranged, a new twist on its metamorphosis.
The collection and the show are treated as a game of Exquisite Corpse, where possibilities unfold. Chimerical creatures emerge, transformed through cutting and craftsmanship, a juxtaposition of codes of volume and technique, jacquards and Intreccio take the form of a new kind of skin, becoming cascading scales and feathers, finding new configurations in clothes and leather article.
Murano glass gains greater malleability as a medium, gripped by these new creatures when applied as the translucent handles on Sardine bags. It points to the end of one part of Bottega Veneta’s history and the beginning of another, of a new mythology.
“I loved the idea of the show in Italy; a procession, a strange carnival, a crowd of people from anywhere and everywhere, and yet, somehow, they all fit together and go in the same direction. I wanted to see what makes people come together in a place with no hierarchy, where everyone is invited.” Matthieu Blazy
