Matthieu Blazy is a clear example of self-improvement. He has done it again, and for the third time in a row, he has offered us the best version of himself. We don’t know how he manages it or what paranormal ability he possesses, but each season he presents is better than the last, and there’s no doubt that the Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta couldn’t have chosen a better successor to Daniel Lee.
Bottega Veneta’s show is one of the highlights of fashion month. Everyone is eager to see what they have in store, and it is no wonder because in recent years it has been one of the brands that have generated the most trends and designed the most must-haves. This uncertainty that many of the professionals in the sector or the brand’s clients could be reflected in the main idea of Blazy’s fashion show, which is about a show that takes place in the street and the surprise of who you will meet around the corner. It’s all about timing, you know what they say: past, present, and future. And Matthieu has this engraved in his mind, as well as his tremendous fascination for craftsmanship in movement.
In this latest collection, there has been everything, but especially techniques, ornaments, characters, and creatures from the past that travel through time and space to speak of the present and the future. A cacophony of animate and inanimate influences that becomes a polyphony. Each has its place, its role and is part of the process: from the ancient bronze runners of ancient Rome (1st century B.C.), through the Futurist Boccioni with his work “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913) to the current Winter 2023 collection which sometimes draws inspiration from ancient mythology or the forms of Futurism and all that is to come – especially present in the contours and silhouettes of the artist Boccioni and appreciated also in the first M.B. collection, and has been expanded since then.
The odyssey of the cast continues and yet now they are archetypes of characters in transformation, journeying from the ordinary to the extraordinary. This is where the question of what is elegant and what is not arises. This adjective has acquired a new acceptance and has been modernised, now the overdressed is no longer elegant, but rather the opposite, casual and casual but with a neat appearance.
Changing clothes” is another approach of the FW23 season, starting from its everyday meaning, through the first designs to more fantastic proposals later on and where new mythology takes shape. There is room in the show for priests and playboys, sleepwalkers, and wayfarers along with mermaids from ancient seas. It is above all a place where there is a joyful, emotional, and personal pleasure in being able to dress oneself; to gain confidence in being what one wants to be through clothes. Here, craftsmanship is reconfigured through innovation by recovering, collecting, reinterpreting, and reconstructing historical silhouettes, such as those of the characters Choris and Flora from Botticelli’s “Primavera”.
Ultimately, the collection and the fashion show have been conceived in the same way as the iconic Surrealist technique of Exquisite Corpse, with multiple possibilities. In this way, chimerical creatures emerge, whose transformations are affected through the cutting and craftsmanship of the garments, composing different codes of volume and techniques thanks to the Jacquard of thick thread or the Intreccio turned into a new type of leather, in the form of a cascade of feathers and scales present in new elaborations of leather garments and accessories. The flexible Murano glass is applied to the translucent handle of the “Sardine” bags worn by these new creatures.
See the collection below:
