This story is part of My First Job in Fashion , a series of interviews with fashion insiders on the roles who made them who they are today.
Fresh out of fashion school, from 1996 until 2000, I was Bottega Veneta’s design director. At the time, it was a job that came along when I really needed one; but looking back, becoming the first person to design ready-to-wear for the house completed my education and changed my life. And it’s all thanks to the Seventh Avenue window-dressing mafia: most especially a guy named Rodney Patterson. This is how it happened.
After I finished at Columbus College of Art Design, all of my friends were moving to New York. So I had to, too. I got into Parsons, and of course, I needed to work my way through school there just like I had to back in Ohio. Back home, I’d made money working in Gap doing window display and merchandising, and so they transferred me to a store on the Upper East Side. One day, about three months after I started, I was in the window working, and this guy knocked on the glass: it was Kevin Santos, head of visual merchandising for Giorgio Armani. They were opening up Armani Exchange and looking to recruit. I ended up doing visual merchandising at AX stores, Giorgio and Emporio, working full time while doing my sophomore and senior year at Parsons School of Design. The people who did that job were like an extended community, and there were a lot of clubs and a lot of partying. I was a partier, always out, but I was also able to turn work around fast. And in fact, I first met Rodney Patterson in the club rather than at work — but we’ll get to him in a moment.
.jpg)
Parsons, at that time, was the place. Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui — all the New York designers had come out of there. I had Donna Karan and Isaac Mizrahi as critics. And I won as a junior this silver thimble from Isaac, and as a senior from Gordon Henderson. Gordon was, at that time, one of the few African American designers working in the space. He was showing on Seventh Avenue. And as I was preparing my final graduate collection, he started putting me in front of designers, because I needed a job to move forward in design. At the same time, because I could draw, I started doing illustration work for DKNY and Ralph Lauren. But I wasn’t designing. Thanks to Gordon, I met with Donna, and I met with Calvin, and I met with Ralph, all in person, but for whatever reason, nothing bit. And I became more and more worried. Because I knew I could make money in visual merchandising, but I wanted to design.
And that’s where Rodney comes in. Because I’d told him about my situation. And one day, he told me he’d heard that Bottega Veneta was looking to start an apparel collection and that it was looking for a designer to do the job.
.jpg)
I didn’t know much about Bottega Veneta. But I was working up and down Madison Avenue, and it had a store there that was a bit decrepit. At that time, it was solely about the Intrecciato bags and not so cool; we thought it was something for old ladies. You know, this was in the ’90s, and my head was in a completely different space — probably my dream job would have been at Helmut Lang — but all my classmates were getting jobs on Seventh Avenue. And even though I’d graduated top of my class nobody would hire me. Although, that’s not exactly true: I sent my portfolio to Robert Pedro, who was working under Marc Jacobs at Perry Ellis — and I got hired! But literally two weeks before I was due to start, Marc Jacobs showed his grunge collection: everyone went crazy, Jacobs got fired, and I never got to start the job. So that wasn’t just a fork in the road for American fashion, it was also a personal fork in the road for me.
I heard about Bottega and went to the store to look. And honestly, I thought: ‘OK, if I get this, it’s gonna be a job.’ You know what I mean? It wasn’t my dream environment. It wasn’t my dream product. I wasn’t thinking about its potential. That didn’t enter my mind. I was just thinking about a job.
.jpg)
Rodney put me together with Laura Moltedo, who was the owner, and I got an appointment to come in. In the meantime, I put together a project to lay out my pitch. The idea was simple. Given that the clothes were going to be a new category for Bottega Veneta — they had never offered clothes in all their history — I envisioned the collection as accessories to the accessories that were the main event at the house. So I put together a capsule, which was very well illustrated because I could do that, and it was the tops and bottoms thing. American sportswear, because that was my training, and that’s what I knew. But I had absolutely no idea how to make it.
You know when you meet certain people and you just instantly feel on the same wavelength and that you speak the same language? Well, that’s what it was like with Laura. She was super cool. An incredible woman. She’d worked for Andy Warhol. It’s rare you meet someone who is that eminent, in that position, but also so cool. She was the centrepiece of that first meeting, but there was also John Calcagno, there was Manuela Morin, who was the shoe designer, and there was Eduardo Wongvalle, who was the bag designer. Anyway, I showed them my portfolio and I said my piece; and honestly, they didn’t give me much feedback. It was a meeting, I had it, and I left. I thought Laura was fucking cool, but I didn’t get the sense I’d gotten the job and it didn’t mean so much to me that I was stressed about it. I left.
.jpg)
Two weeks later, the phone rang. It was Laura, and she said come to Vicenza. She didn’t talk about a contract or anything, she just said come. So I packed up, caught a flight and went to Italy. And essentially, I never came back.
I got there and I understood that they wanted me to do the job, and they gave me a contract. She said make us an apparel collection and we’ll put them in the stores. It was good money. I walked into the factory, and it was amazing. All the napa, all the crocodile. They produced all the bags out of the family factory. But of course, they had nothing for clothing: zip. And I didn’t speak the language; I had no connections beyond Bottega.
I didn’t know anything. The only thing that I knew was that I could draw, and I realised that if I find myself in a position like this where I have to make it happen, I’ve got to figure that out, right? So I had to dive in with no fear, or at least I couldn’t show them I was fearful. And the first thing I had to do was find a factory.
.jpg)
I went to Milan, asked around and walked into this factory called Punto Maglia on Via Moscova. This was back when there were still several large manufacturers operating in the centre of town, but they’ve mostly moved now. I was literally just peeking around the place and met Silvana Galbusera, who was in charge. We got on really well, again almost instantly, and she agreed to help develop knitwear ideas — which at that time was something I didn’t have much education in at all. We developed a really intimate and also mutually enriching relationship where we would exchange; I would bring to her in terms of taste and design, she would bring to me the techniques of actually translating them. This is where I learnt the actual mechanics of knitwear, which has since become my specialism. It was my school.
I found and started working with another factory, too, and developed that first capsule. And Laura put it into the stores in a very modest way at first, and it worked. So we kept going. We opened up the first Bottega Veneta design office in Milan, in Palazzo Serbelloni. It was small but very beautiful. Luca Mautone was one of the two first design assistants I hired and he stayed with the company for a long time, all through Tomas Maier’s time and some of Daniel Lee’s time, too. The other assistant was a Korean gal named Kyungin Choi, who eventually moved to New York to work with Calvin Klein. It was just the three of us and we were very inexperienced, but we also had total freedom and a lot of drive and desire. It could be quite frustrating because there were so many exciting things happening in fashion more broadly, and we knew we needed to observe a kind of classicism to be true to the brand at that time, but what was really thrilling about was the responsibility: it was all on us.
.jpg)
It wasn’t all work, though. Milan was absolutely alive at the time. Marcelo Burlon, Riccardo Tisci, Dean and Dan, Neil Barrett… we were all of the same generation and those were our clubbing years. We could dance all night and go straight into the office. For my first few years, it could be hard living in Italy, and sometimes I would go back to New York just for the weekend, but I was also really focused on what this could be. Another aspect was that I was very conscious that I was one of very few Black designers working in the Italian industry at that time because there were so few Black people around then. Even though I found my people, my role and felt welcomed I was very aware of the otherness that I represented.
In all, we worked for maybe two years before we did our first presentation, and it was a transformation moment. Until then, we had only distributed inside the stores. That collection, an all-white collection, made an impression. I still remember Polly Mellen coming into the showroom and screaming that we had to take it back to New York. And that’s when wholesale began. Afterwards, Laura and her then-husband Vittorio came into the design office and gave me a bonus.
.jpg)
We never had a stylist during that period, but we did start a working relationship with Franca Sozzani and Luca Stoppini, because Franca was paying attention to all the Italian brands where she saw potential and working to develop the relationships with Italian Vogue. This led to us shooting our first campaigns with a face. I remember it featured Rachel Roberts and was shot by Peter Lindbergh in Deauville. And we were doing shows, and getting some good reviews — although, there was one by Constance White in The New York Times that tore us to shreds that I will never forget — and appearing in editorials shot by Steven Meisel. And then after two seasons, Autumn/Winter 1998 and SS99, Laura decided that we would do the show in New York.
It was because of the store on Madison — the same store I’d gone to look at when Rodney first told me about the job. Things were going well in the business and they’d put money into refitting and redesigning the space. The plan was to have a show and a grand opening. And incidentally, this would be the first time we showed with a stylist, who was Katie Grand. My first choice for stylist had been Edward Enninful, but he was busy working his magic with Dolce Gabbana. However, he told me about someone I hadn’t heard about who he said was great: this girl at The Face. So Kevin Cooper Ray, our press guy in the US, got in touch with her. That was the first time we met and I’m still working with her today on Perfect.
.jpg)
So that show happened and it was good, really good. Then, we had this party. Perry Farrell DJ’d and Ben Harper was there and this really mixed New York crowd: I mean Grace Jones, Donald Trump, Veronica Webb. It was a situation. It was great.
And back in Italy suddenly there were a lot of meetings happening, and people coming into the factory to see things, and a lot going on. At the same time, I’d been working with Manuela Morin inside Bottega Veneta — she was the shoe designer there and had become like my work sister — and we’d started thinking about developing something ourselves. The idea was a collection called ‘Le Flesh’. We were on no type of exclusivity contract back then. The idea kind of was that it stretched our other muscles and that it was the opposite to Bottega.
And then I remember an article came out that we were launching the collection. I remember it coming into the fax machine in the office, Cooper showing it to me, and then Laura seeing it — she freaked out. And as I understood only later, why she really freaked out is because they were in negotiations with Gucci Group about selling the company. And at that point, we were part of what the company represented. She got really angry, but it blew over. We continued to work at Bottega Veneta and also on Le Flesh. However, Giles Deacon came in, too, with Katie on design and worked on a show for a season. I knew around then that it was time for me to do something else. I loved the brand and I’d learnt everything there. And I know Laura cared for me, and I cared for her. But then I got offered a job by Iceberg. A really good consultancy. So it was time to go. And I did. Manuela left, too, for a gig at Stella McCartney as the accessories designer. So we had our money jobs, and we could work together on Le Flesh. When we told Laura we were going, the Gucci deal hadn’t happened yet and was still a secret — but I think she was relieved because she knew that if the deal went through and the brand was majority sold, she couldn’t protect us. Not long after, the deal with Gucci went through.
.jpg)
I still talk with Laura today. She lives in a beautiful house in Bastia, and makes olive oil. And although I’ve done a lot of things since, Bottega Veneta will always be my school, the reason I’ve been in Italy for all these years. It remains the most beautiful, enigmatic, soulful brand. That tagline ‘When Your Own Initials Are Enough’ still sums up to me the essence of it. It has that purity, confidence and quality to speak for itself through its products. To have had the small part I had in its history, setting up that office in Milan and putting out those first collections, still gives me a glow.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
A progressive romance: Lorenzo Serafini shares his vision for Alberta Ferretti
Roberto Cavalli’s Fausto Puglisi on revitalising the brand while honouring the man
How Mike Amiri is building a fashion house for the 22nd century
