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There were a lot of exciting moments during the 2023 edition of Vogue’s Forces of Fashion, but surely high up on the list was Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy, who appeared in conversation with Nicole Phelps, Global Director of Vogue Runway and Vogue Business. In the short time he’s been at the helm of the Italian label, he’s already begun to shift the way people dress and think about fashion.
The wide-ranging chat began with the announcement earlier this week of the Accademia Labor et Ingenium, a design academy founded by Bottega Veneta to ensure that the leather craftsmanship that is the label’s patrimony continues to live on to the next generation. “It functions like during the Renaissance, when young apprentices would go and learn from their masters,” Blazy explained. The school will accept 50 students a year with the promise of work after they’ve completed their apprenticeship. “At Bottega there is a knowledge from the artisans from the older generation and I think the company has the responsibility to pass it on; but what’s also very interesting is that we are going to have people from all around the world that will come in with their ‘own luggage,’ new techniques that we can develop, and that’s very exciting news for everyone in the company and I can’t wait to meet them.”
Phelps also asked the French Belgian designer about his sting at Maison Martin Margiela in the early 2010s, a position that was anonymous, until he was famously “outed” by the journalist Suzy Menkes. “When they called me at Margiela, a lot of people told me ‘Martin is not in the house anymore, it’s a dead zone, you’re not going to do anything there,’ so I took it as a super challenge and an opportunity,” he explained. “It was all about transformation: you would cut into a perfect jacket and make a skirt out of it. You would take cans and turn [them] into a shoe. Everything was a possibility.” Of the experience of working anonymously versus now being a very known industry star, he added mischievously, “the only thing that changed is that sometimes people call you ‘Matthieu’, and you don’t know who they are and that’s a little weird.”
The designer also recalled the thought process behind the look that opened his first Bottega Veneta collection: a white tank top and a pair of light wash jeans, both of which turned out to be made of leather; something that many in the audience—including Phelps—didn’t realize until it was pointed it out at the after-show dinner. “And had he not told me that, I would ve written a completely different review,” she said as the room filled with laughter.
“The thing with Bottega is that it’s all about craft, and a lot of people see craft as something very dusty or overworked, and when we sat down with the team I said, ‘let’s do something mega-craft that is also extremely real.” Blazy continued, “I kept on thinking about Natalie Portman when she walked in the final scene from Closer, she’s wearing a tank top and a pair of jeans and the confidence is amazing. Everyone looks at her and the outfit is the most basic. And just to trick the story a little bit, I challenged the team to realize it fully in leather. It took time, it was really complicated, but the result was so simple and I liked the idea that no one [noticed it] and I also thought there was something quite perverted in the idea that you can only realize [they are] leather if someone touched you or you’re getting touched. There was something quite erotic about it.”
For his spring 2023 collection, Blazy had an instantly iconic collaboration with the designer and architect Gaetano Pesce, one of his creative heroes. “I think I was very naive and I just picked up my phone and called him to ask if he would do something with me,” he recalled, “and because Gaetano thinks like a child he said, ‘yes, let’s do it.’” Blazy described how he worked in tandem with Pesce, creating the clothes, and the colorful set—which included Pesce’s signature colorful chairs and a paint-spill floor. “Sometimes I worried, ‘are the clothes going to work on all these colors?” To which Blazy recalled Pesce replying, “Who cares? It’s about what we do together.”
Listen to Vogue editors talk the best of fashion in 2023 on this episode of The Run-Through here.
