It was announced today that Louise Trotter will become the new creative director at Bottega Veneta following Matthieu Blazy’s exit. The British designer has enjoyed a truly diverse career in her three decades in the industry, which have all contributed to a unique point of view. Her most recent gig was Carven where her vision for the youthful French brand was a little sporty, architectural, and unabashedly feminine without ever venturing into the saccharine. Her first collection featured oversized silk anoraks with matching skirts, sheer organza long shorts and pencil skirts worn under—and—over tailored jackets and button-downs, and a strapless draped white dress like something fashioned out of a bedsheet. “I like clothes that feel like you are staying in bed,” she said in a recent interview.
Prior to her short stint at Carven, she was the creative director at Lacoste, known around the world for its singular tiny crocodile motif. With her first collection for that brand circa fall 2019, she injected the French sportswear institution with a kind of elegance that was unfussy and grounded, showing pleated silk dresses worn underneath oversized cable knit vests, and tailoring that was precise yet unpretentious, often in unexpected colors (and colorblocks) and offbeat materials and textures. Her models always wore flats—sneakers, loafers, shower sandals etc, to signify the practicality inherent to the brand. If the runway styling leaned editorial, the Lacoste stores—or at least the website, which I checked often—reflected the fresh attitude Trotter championed in her shows. This wasn’t a case of selling an unattainable fantasy; what you saw was what you got.
That real-world sensibility is Trotter’s most important trait, honed through the years. She began her career at Whistles, a British contemporary fashion brand (think, a slightly more directional J.Crew), before moving across the Atlantic first to work as head of womenswear at Calvin Klein Jeans, while Calvin himself was still in the business. When Klein exited the brand, she moved on to Gap where she became the head of womenswear. If you recall, the early aughts were an exciting time at the American brand, still riding high—both in its advertising and in the slightly more directional styles it offered—after the “Everybody in Khakis” commercials of the late ’90s.
Eventually she returned to London to work at Joseph, a legendary British brand founded by Joseph Ettedgui in the ’60s which began as a small shop attached to a hair salon on King’s Road that carried fashion from Kenzo Takada and Jean Charles de Castelbajac. By the ’90s, he had established stores all over the world, and had also introduced an in-house label, which rose to fame for singularly cut narrow trousers. Shortly after Trotter’s arrival, the brand began to stage shows during London Fashion Week, where she was able to bring back for a time some of the furor Joseph had experienced in the ’90s—it became the go-to brand for fashion editors to find their basics.
Next year is set to be a monumental one in fashion, with debuts from Peter Copping at Lanvin, Sarah Burton at Givenchy, Michael Rider at Celine, Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford, Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, and now Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta. With her wide range of experiences and her knack for making clothes that women really want, she’s a timely addition to the new guard shifting fashion into a new era. Now all we have to do is wait.
