Images: Bottega Veneta

OH TO BE a young man reading Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life for the first time while wearing the Bottega Veneta Summer 2027 collection.

The poet’s flâneur, idling through the Paris crowds with an eye for every cuff and collar, would have found much to study in Louise Trotter’s third outing for the Italian brand shown in Milan. The British designer took as her subject the passage from spring into summer in her adopted city, the weeks when coats come off and the body is given a little more air.

Trotter has made it very clear that, above all else, the Bottega Veneta outlook prioritises the sense of craft. That clothing can be an art form still, running through every stage of the making. If there was such a thing as an art schools version of preppy, this would be it.

Tailoring was cut with more room between cloth and body and the ever-present leather was worked until it was noticeably lighter, so that a tobacco-brown zip jacket, worn with olive trousers and a woven intrecciato belt, looked supple as butter. A long leather khaki mac floated around the body, a dark intrecciato pouch tucked under one arm while a black suit was loosened, the blazer revealing a pale blue shirt with fringing across the front. Trotter is very good at stopping the hand before it adds too much, a skill that suits the Vincentian house well.

And can we call a house with the gravitas that Bottega has quirky? It has quirks. The embellishment of a coat with lavender, the leather floral arrangement on a belt. The newspaper made from intrecciato leather. Playfulness is never far from the mind of Trotter or the brand, it seems. The delightful array of hats confirm this – some functional, but many ornamental. But again, always with that same light touch applied to the design philosophy.

Then there is the question of how the clothes are worn. Baudelaire wrote that “the idea that man has of beauty imprints itself upon his entire presentation, wrinkles or stiffens his coat, rounds or aligns his gestures, and even subtly penetrates, over time, the features of his face. Man ends up resembling what he would like to be.”

So it is with Bottega. These are clothes cut to take an impression from the man inside them, the crease at the elbow, the pocket shaped by a habitual hand, the leather that settles over a season to the line of one pair of shoulders.

Trotter took the thought further with the set. Guests sat on Karton Hocker by Berlin-based Ukrainian artist Illya Goldman Gubin, stools made from cardboard boxes crumpled by the artist’s embrace and coated in resin. Their interlocking flaps resemble the leather strips woven into intrecciato. A leather tulip, peony or lily rested on each seat. The invitations, posters printed with an image of a Karton Hocker, had each been crinkled by hand, by Goldman Gubin or a member of the house’s staff, so every guest arrived holding the creases of someone else’s grip.

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