Tomas Maier s remedy for breaking the downward spiral of depression is irresistible glamour. "With all that s going on, I just switched off the TV news and thought about designing appetizing clothes to make women feel pretty and attractive," he said before the show. "Let s get out of this!" That rallying cry made for possibly his most resolved and beautiful collection yet—gently done, yet spiked with a new undercurrent of eroticism.
It began with simple rectangles of cloth—folded into ivory envelope coats or pieced into fluid charmeuse dresses—and then built momentum through perfectly cut sheaths. One number—essentially a single square of black wool with armholes, wrapped to fall in a ruffle in the front while dipping asymmetrically over the shoulder—looked as if it had been wound around Sasha Pivovarova almost spontaneously. Of course, there s more than spareness of cut going on here. The desirabilty is in Maier s fabrics, some of which are so refined even the camera can t pick up the nuances. The second look out—a cream coat over a strapless dress—passed within inches of the noses of the audience, but who knew the coat was covered with a fine layer of organza, or realized the dress was not a matte cotton canvas but leather? Only the woman who wore it, or someone close enough to stroke her. Which is Bottega Veneta s not-for-public-consumption code in a nutshell.
And yet: This is a time when even the stealthily wealthy need an extra push to open their finely crafted intrecciato crocodile purses. That s where drop-dead sex and glamour step in. Lingerie corseting built into the rib section of covered-up jersey dresses, outlining braless breasts, did that in an outrageously classy way. And then came a sequence of pleated goddess dresses, catching the air as the girls swept past. They were superb.
