At Bottega Veneta, Fashion to Draw Out Your Inner Child
There are only a handful of shows each season, if that many, that make the kind of seismic shifts in fashion that will be felt for months or even years to follow. Consistently, but particularly with his Spring/Summer 2025 collection, Matthieu Blazy achieves this at Bottega Veneta.
Saturday evening in Milan he presented a collection simply titled “WOW!” Blazy meant it to reflect the childlike wonder, joy, and earnestness that inspired his designs, feelings that he also hoped his clothes would evoke. “This is about the power of sincerity over strategy,” he wrote, adding, “What would the kid in you want?” But it was also an apt descriptor of the reaction to the show. You could practically feel it emanating from the social media feeds of everyone who encountered the collection, particularly the showgoers who arrived to find that they’d be seated on animal-shaped leather bean bag chairs. (Available for purchase if you’re willing to shell out $6000.)
The first half of the collection proposed a new idea for power dressing, centering the radical idea that you can dress for work without taking yourself too seriously. What if, Blazy suggested, you were just a kid playing dress up? How would the clothes hang on you? And who would you want to be? Blazy played with proportion on suiting, pairing slightly oversized blazers, their shoulders jutting out, with half-pant-half-skirts, and then more skirts over pants.
Models carried multiple bags–a more formal leather purse along with a grocery bag (“the disposable made precious” Blazy noted)–to mimic the commute home after having stopped off to run an errand. One male model wearing a formal, yet oversized suit, had a pink backpack over one shoulder, the dad dropping off his daughter at school.
The color palate, which melded bright oranges and primary reds and yellows with navy, grey, and burgundy, was inspired by the chaotic, busy world of Richard Scarry books. If you don’t have kids, these books often evoke dread in parents, as each page contains dozens of drawings and accompanying stories of cute animals driving trucks or fire trucks or flying planes and it can be daunting to get through a page let alone a whole book. How totally charming for Blazy to take it as inspiration, another reminder to rediscover delight. If we forced ourselves to look at the way our kids do, or even tried to remember how we looked at it when we were younger and less self-conscious and surely less jaded, how much more fun could we have?
More delight followed: the flannel shirt blown up and structured, almost with a Bar jacket silhouette; trenches over jackets over dresses all smashed and wrinkled because real life is messy; playful bunny ears on belt closures or frog brooches to cinch up cardigans; formal looks that shimmered and looked covered in confetti, real live Maxes from Where the Wild Things Are.
Fashion is fun, after all. And it can be experienced most joyfully when we remember that.
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