It was announced today that Matthieu Blazy is stepping down from his role as creative director at Bottega Veneta (Louise Trotter has been announced as the successor). In the little over three years in which he held the role, Blazy delivered one powerhouse collection after another, eschewing the “quiet luxury” aesthetic that so dominated other runways in favor of exuberance and the joy of craft. Looking back at his six runway collections, a clear image emerges of a designer who in a short time established visual and emotional features that he returned to again and again, even as he pushed his storytelling forward. From his use of trompe l’oeil leather—“perverse banality,” he called it—to his love of people-watching and characters to his involvement in the arts, these are the 14 Bottega Veneta Blazy-isms that we’ll miss the most. Here’s hoping we’ll pick this thread up again soon.
A Tantalizing Opening Look
Blazy’s debut show at Bottega Veneta landed as a collective exhale. The opening look, a white tank top with a pair of jeans and a fabulous burgundy bag epitomized a fresh simplicity, one that we’d soon come to find disguised the depths of his sensibility and his knack for craft. The tank top and jeans were actually made of leather, an illusion that quickly became one of Blazy’s signatures. When he picked it up again the following season, he explained that the flannel shirt modeled by Kate Moss required 12 layers of prints to achieve the depth of color he was after. “It’s this kind of casual comfort and we put it to an extreme and we call it perverse banality,” he said at the time. One can’t help but wonder what he could achieve with tweed.—José Criales-Unzueta
The Pap-Shot That Launched Bottega Veneta’s First It-bag
It takes good design, a touch of serendipity, and a pop culture moment to launch an It-bag these days. For Blazy’s Andiamo, it was a 2023 viral paparazzi shot of the actor Jacob Elordi balancing the bag with a cup of coffee and another of iced matcha. The Euphoria star had garnered an unlikely reputation for always carrying a good handbag, but it was this old-school-y, everyday carryall that he seemed the most charmed by, and it, in turn, charmed the rest of the world. I remember seeing many people—not just women, but men like Elordi—saying they were ordering an Andiamo on social media after this photo dropped—some things you just can’t force. Naturally, he named Elordi an official ambassador in May. The lead image of him making cutesy bunny ears went viral, of course. —JCU
A Brand in Motion Stays in Motion
From his very first collection, Blazy honed in on the idea of people in movement. He eschewed the standard linear runway, and held his shows in cavernous spaces with criss-crossed paths—it was a way to recreate the people-watching experience out in the world. “The idea was to bring back energy, a silhouette that really expressed motion, because Bottega is a bag company, so you go somewhere, you don’t stay home,” he said backstage after his fall 2022 debut. This feeling was communicated in the clothes’ own silhouettes: novel trousers were cut with a v-shaped hem longer in the front than the back, and coats were curved like sails blown by the wind, their sleeves also set with a slight bend at the elbows so that no straight lines could interrupt the journey forward. Ditto for the extravagant leather circle skirts, set on the bias and layered over leather fringe—the skirt moved one way and the fringed moved every other way like a sartorial Big Bang. Knowing that most people would experience the collection through still images, the question became how to make sure that energy lived on. That was easy for Blazy—the looks were shot from the side, ensuring that even if you were just mindlessly scrolling through the runway photos, you’d instantly notice his dynamic proposition. The sideways shots launched an industry-wide trend.—Laia Garcia-Furtado
Print, Dead? Not According to Blazy
Ahead of Blazy’s second show, he flew to New York City and hosted a cozy dinner inside The Strand’s Rare Book Room, a place he first explored on family trips when he was young and had come to spend inordinate amounts of time in as an adult, working at Calvin Klein with Raf Simons and Pieter Mulier (he even fell asleep inside once). In his tenure at Bottega Veneta, Blazy showcased his unabashed love for print; releasing a seasonal “fanzine” that revealed his obsessions. Over five “issues,” the fanzine paid homage to Kate Moss via a recreation of the designer’s teenage inspiration binder, and featured a suite of drawings by the designer Hussein Chalayan as well as the work of the photographer Alec Soth. But it was the fact that in 2022 he brought back the legendary gay magazine Butt, which featured erotic photography, and in-depth interviews and profiles with a diverse group of queer artists, intellectuals, and characters about town, that made fashion headlines. Founded by Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom in 2001, it shuttered a decade later after the pair decided to focus on Fantastic Man magazine, which they launched in 1997. Butt-ega Veneta, as someone has likely referred to it at least once, returned as smart and horny a magazine as ever. In 2023 Bottega Veneta went on to support the launch of a magazine called Air Afrique with a focus on “Afro-diasporic art and conversation,” and an art publication named Magma.—LGF
Reinventing Fashion Advertising One Shot of A$AP Rocky and Kendall Jenner at a Time
One of Blazy’s most genius ideas at Bottega Veneta came when, in late 2023, the label released a series of campaign images starring A$AP Rocky and Kendall Jenner. It was dubbed “Readymade”—presumably, given Blazy’s keenness for an art reference, as a nod to the Marcel Duchamp who coined the term—and produced in partnership with Getty Images and Backgrid, the famous celebrity paparazzi agency. The brilliance of the concept went past the images themselves. The photos were first released not as a campaign, but simply as celebrity shots of two very famous, and very fashionable, people. As things often go online, media outlets like this one reported on the actually-very-good outfits. By the time the campaign was revealed as such, everyone had already covered it. A clever coup of the celebrity style complex.—JCU
A Safe-Bet for the Best-Dressed List
Julianne Moore looking like a million bucks in a custom golden Bottega Veneta dress at the Venice Film Festival. A glowing—and pregnant—Rihanna emerging in an aquamarine wrap, leather gloves, and satin skirt at the 2023 Oscars. Michelle Yeoh looking wicked at a Wicked premiere in Bottega green. Elordi, again, debuting his much-discussed beard at the Marrakech International Film Festival in a black Bottega tux with a tiny frog brooch. Is there anyone who doesn’t look good in Blazy’s clothes? It helps, of course, that Blazy knows how to pick a muse.—JCU
The Gaetano Pesce Collaborations
The set for Blazy’s spring 2023 collection doubled as an installation by the legendary Italian artist and designer Gaetano Pesce. Known for his use of unorthodox materials, Pesce poured boldly colored resin over the entire runway, turning it into an artful Candyland-style path, and designed 400 one-of-a-kind resin chairs for the show’s guests, which became instant must-haves. Not a problem, since the chairs—named Come Stai?, Italian for ‘how are you?’—were smartly available for purchase. But that wasn’t the end of their collaboration. A few months later, the 83-year old artist took over the Bottega Veneta store on Via Montenapoleone, creating an undulating landscape in his signature psychedelia which functioned as a display of sorts for a special limited-edition bag designed by Pesce and crafted by Bottega artisans.—LGF
Matthieu Blazy, Great Conversationalist
At the 2023 edition of Vogue’s Forces of Fashion everyone got to experience Blazy’s charm in real time. In conversation with Nicole Phelps, the designer freely spoke about his time at Margiela, when he was famously revealed as the anonymous creative director by then-editor at British Vogue Suzy Menkes (“my fashion coming-out”), and the biggest difference in his life since taking over at Bottega (“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). He also talked about the unlikely inspiration behind the extravagant map that covered the floor of his spring 2024 collection. “When I was a kid, we would have a box of Corn Flakes and on the back of the box there would always be a map of the world and there would be games,” he said. “It was very nice in the morning to you just have your Corn Flakes with milk and just travel on your box; and that’s how the conversation about the set started.” Another reason why breakfast is the most important meal of the day.—LGF
A Lover of Art
Blazy grew up surrounded by special objet d’arts and attending auctions thanks to his father, an art specialist, and his mother who is a historian. So it comes as no surprise that his vision for Bottega Veneta was so intertwined with art and design objects. The label twice sponsored the Dia Beacon Spring Benefit; began an ongoing partnership with the Aspen Art Museum, supporting exhibitions by important artists like John Chamberlain; and celebrated its decade in Brazil by staging an art show-cum-happening at the famed Casa Vidrio designed by the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, which focused on contemporary Brazilian artists. At his fall 2023 show, a Boccioni sculpture and a few Roman bronzes punctuated the space, while larger-than life Murano glass cacti decorated the fall 2024 set, which also featured Le Corbusier’s LC14 Cabanon stools, and a floor with a matching wood grain pattern.—LGF
Flora and Fauna for Fawning Over
One of the most enchanting themes of Blazy’s Bottega Veneta was his embrace of the animal kingdom and the creation of what, by now, could be a whole botanical garden. There were charming belts modeled after bunnies and snakes, crochet leather flowers, and leather leaves that clung to strappy sandals. This is a designer who loves the great outdoors—maybe he’ll turn the Grand Palais into a zoo for the day.—JCU
Innocence, Whimsy, and Curiosity on the Runway
Blazy often referred to the way children saw the world as inspiration for his own path. “As a kid, there is the adventure of the everyday—there’s a feeling that anything could happen, no matter how fantastical and we are not so bound by regular expectations and conventions,” he wrote in the spring 2025 show notes. That collection encouraged a naive approach to getting dressed—just experiment and see what feels good!—and also resulted in an irresistible objet: a giant version of Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever—you know, the red one with the Lowly Worm on the front, only done in Bottega Veneta’s exquisite intrecciato leather. (Blazy happens to think Lowly’s outfit of “one shoe, the Tyrolean hat, the red bowtie, the blue and green body tube” is exceptional.) He showed off his penchant for a good chair once again, sitting guests on bean bag chairs in the shape of animals, inspired by the classic Zanotta Sacco designed in 1968. But that wasn’t the only time a cartoon character inspired the epitome of luxury for the designer; the Kalimero bag, which he launched in his very first collection, was influenced by an Italian cartoon chicken who carried his belongings around on a piece of fabric tied to the end of a stick. The designer made them from hand-braided leather, and had models carry them over their shoulders just like the chicken, except of course, his versions were infinitely chic.—LGF
Photo: François Halard / Courtesy of Bottega Veneta
Everybody Has a Fragrance, But No One Else’s Looks This Good
Blazy has a sweet spot for Venice, and has a thing for Murano glass, which originates in the capital of Italy’s Veneto region. Prior to the launch of his fabulous—and delicious smelling—fragrance collection, which comes encased in bottles made to look like mouth-blown Murano glass. He’s always been one to embrace the hand-feel of craft; while others might see the bubbles in these bottles as imperfections, here they become a design feature. So. Utterly. Chic.—JCU
People-Watching on the Runway
Another constant is Blazy’s love of people-watching. His collections for Bottega Veneta rarely featured one or two singular ideas iterated in slightly different colors or lengths; rather, his 80-something look shows were filled with a myriad of different characters—teen boys and girls trying on their parents’ suits for the first time, working men and working women on their way the office and back, sleepy young women walking around in their pajamas and cozy socks, moms on their way to the grocery store, and dads on their way home from school pick-up with a pink and purple backpack slung over their shoulders. “It’s not about the total look,” he once said. “We talked a lot about what makes individuals special, the pieces they wear and the pieces that tell a story—the pieces, sometimes, that are a bit off, something that feels very personal, what makes you different from others.”—LGF
