Bottega Veneta
If there was a house that epitomized timelessness this season, it was Mathieu Blazy's Bottega Veneta. Blazy's 'Italia' trilogy show was a season-defining moment that introduced a new Bottega Veneta through a conflation of the country's past, present, and future.
This season the invitation to the show was a leather watch strap with no watch on it, hinting at the collection's psychological terrain. To further set the stage, Blazy borrowed timeless bronzes, three of his favorite artworks, and put them amid the plaza where the models walked: the famous bronze runners of Pompeii from 1BC, and in the other room, the 1913 sculpture by the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni, "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space."
Blazy drew on the mythology of antiquity and Futurism's shape of things to come to capture the randomness of a carnival parade. In this parade, a cast of character archetypes descended the runway, individual characters, who might be walking down the street. He skewed the idea of 'getting changed' from its everyday meaning in the early silhouettes to its fantastical promises later on, where a new mythology took shape. People in states of change — just waking up, getting undressed, swapping garments — became Roman priests, Agnelli-like playboys, and later, chimerical sirens of the screen and of the sea.