Matthieu Blazy did it again, electrifying Milan Fashion Week with a Bottega Veneta show on Saturday night that delivered breathless elegance in almost every outing.
He had decided to “celebrate the everyday” and managed to awaken powerful emotions with shirts, coats, dresses and skirts. But what shirts! What coats! What dresses! And what skirts!
“I think there was something beautiful about the idea of making something monumental out of the everyday,” Blazy said backstage, her eyes still filled with tears from earlier.
The French designer has an identifiable hand and mastery of draping, whether it's a one-shoulder top that wraps around the body and slides over one hip to an oversized T-shirt with a scarf-like appendage that crosses the neck , or a Voluptuous leather coat with a windblown collar that partly rises and partly wrinkles.
Sometimes the drama came from color, whether it was a saffron suede shirt worn over a white turtleneck and black leather pants, or one of her flared T-shirt dresses, equal parts olive, rust and white and some interlaced so that the seams stuck out. where the colors meet, adorned with hardware that looked like hair bows.
He invoked a plethora of moods and attitudes from the humble shirt; here tucked and billowing, neck set at a jaunty angle; there, loose and unbuttoned, etched with pale lines that recalled the contemplative pencil paintings of Agnes Martin. For men, he expanded a black shirt to the size of a trench coat and draped it over his shoulders. They were all sensational.
Since being promoted to Bottega's creative helm a little more than two years ago, Blazy has played with what he called “perverse banality” by executing very ordinary-looking basics (jeans, plaid shirts and gray sweatshirts) in supple nubuck and then charging a small fortune for them.
“Here nothing imitated anything. Cotton was cotton,” she clarified backstage.
In this vein of keeping things real, she added little superfluous decoration (a beaded neckline on a sleeveless jersey dress here, a busy print of dense squiggles and numbers there) and instead brought out fireworks from the fabrics themselves. Tops and skirts with thin vertical gills of fabric glowed from yellow to mango as the models walked, while the final T-shirt dresses were artfully shredded to symbolize fire and ashes.
Blazy's ensemble of burned wooden planks and giant Murano glass cacti illuminated from within fueled a subliminal narrative about resilience and renewal, reminding us that forests eventually return after fire ravages them, and that beautiful flowers They still manage to flourish in the harshest deserts. .
Almost miraculously, their scarf-tipped skirts and tie-dyed prints evoked the beauty and horror of flames, as did their spectacular red column dresses that sprang below the knees with protruding, pointed tongues of fabric.
Blazy tells compelling, captivating stories in some of the most sophisticated clothing imaginable, and the moral of the story is that dressing well “brings dignity,” she said. “It's what makes us human.”
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