“I Was Thinking of the Power of the ‘Wow’”: The Way of Blazy’s Bottega

This story is taken from the Summer/Autumn 2025 issue of Another Man, which is on sale internationally from April 24. Pre-order here:

“Quiet power” was how Matthieu Blazy defined the initial aesthetic impulse for Bottega Veneta. His first collection for men and women, Autumn/Winter 2022, would appear deceptively straightforward on the surface. Archetypal and almost confrontational in a certain simplicity, it would begin with jeans and a vest top. But those jeans, that uniform of the everyday, loaded with various meanings – of, as Blazy put it, “tradition, street, timeless, freedom, cinematographic, human – be yourself!”– became the motif for the realisation of a parallel world for Bottega Veneta. Of course, those jeans weren’t quite what they seemed; crafted from supple leather and intricately printed to visually resemble stone-washed denim, accomplished to an incredibly high degree, melding the artisanal with the machine, this was not a simple pair of jeans. Rather, this was a statement of intent, transcending the visual and engaging other senses and feelings. Blazy knew what his realisation of a world would entail from the start; this is how he would begin to build it.

It was a distinct creation, peopled with characters that would recur throughout his tenure and purposely, as he put it, “cinematographic” in its intent. These characters would mix fact with fiction, models that would travel through the collections and, in actuality, from around the globe, searched for by the casting director Anita Bitton; they would define this catwalk world and the real one for the designer. What they would wear would identify the part they would play: an individual character in a collection with their own backstory, as well as one straight from Blazy’s head.

A flurry of descriptions would accompany each look for a show; weird, personal, witty, idiosyncratic, fantasy and reality were intertwined in the imaginary scenarios. “What Agnelli might look like as a kid. With his friends in a playground ... ” said Blazy in the run-up to his final show and collection, Spring/ Summer 2025, of his abiding Italian male style obsession, the industrialist playboy, Gianni Agnelli. His influence was recurrent throughout Blazy’s tenure. Or “Tom Sawyer, a gesture, going somewhere, with the bag slung over his shoulder,” Tom Sawyer was always present from the first collection, and that bag would be the handwoven Kalimero. The Italian and American axis was always strong, just as it was in the history of Bottega Veneta – from Tom Hanks in Big in the final collection to Carlo Mollino in all of his multi-modality from the first and throughout – although it would always be the Italian influence that would win out. His first three shows – there were six showing collections in total – were a distinct Italian trilogy for the designer, culminating in ‘A Parade’ for Autumn/Winter 2023 and one of the high points in Blazy’s output.

“I loved the idea of the parade in Italy; a procession, a strange carnival, a gathering of people from anywhere and everywhere and yet somehow, they all fit,” he said in the run-up to the show. “I wanted to look at what makes people gather together, without a sense of hierarchy.”

The parade was a place of priests and playboys, sleepwalkers and streetwalkers with sirens of the screen and the ancient seas. It was both sacred and profane. Above all, it was a place where there was the joyful, emotional and personal pleasure of dressing up, of gaining the confidence to be whoever the wearer wanted to be through clothing. This was part of Blazy’s Bottega way.

Here, the ordinary was made into the extraordinary, usually through the transformation of leather, invoking an idea of “perverse banality” particularly in his second showing collection for Spring/Summer 2023. The transformational aspect of clothing and the idea of the journey were returned to again and again – whether this was travelling in the mind or in actuality. An odyssey was proposed for Spring/Summer 2024, regeneration for Autumn/Winter 2024 and rites of passage for Spring/Summer 2025; no matter what, there were always ideas of growth, change and emotion in the clothing and in the startling settings for the shows in which this almost filmic wardrobe would play out.

“I was thinking of the power of the ‘wow’. The child-like enthusiasm, the adventurousness and the celebration of the idea of wonder as an adult. That’s how I put the collection together – I asked myself, ‘Would I say wow?’” – Matthieu Blazy 

For the setting and seating of his second show, Spring/Summer 2023, Matthieu Blazy commissioned the late, great architect-designer-artist Gaetano Pesce. Pesce had been one of Blazy’s heroes since his teenage years. It was a commission that also writ large his ambitions for Bottega: to be part of a wider, Italian design landscape. Here, the models would walk through what Blazy saw as Pesce’s “mindscape”, a sculptural, resin floor and one juxtaposed with his clothes. The 400 guests would be sat on a newly realised chair, the ‘Come Stai?’ a diversified edition, each unique and different. As Pesce explained prior to the show:

“This space is a tribute to diversity. It is about the human being; we are all different. People who say we are all the same – fuck them! We are all different and this is our defining quality – otherwise, we are just a copy. We are all originals and this is one of the themes of my design.”

It was also a defining element of Blazy’s Bottega. This would be one of the last significant commissions of Pesce’s illustrious career.

Other seating design interventions followed, including a re-presentation of Gio Ponti’s ‘Superleggera’ chairs, unaltered for the Autumn/Winter 2023 show and a scorched spin on Le Corbusier’s ‘LC14 Cabanon’ stool – something said to have started life as a whiskey crate – for Autumn/Winter 2024. Yet it would be the animal effigies of ‘The Ark’, inspired by the Zanotta Sacco bean bag, with shapes proposed by Blazy and his studio, specially made for the Spring/Summer 2025 show, that would fully capture the imagination and mood once more. After all, who can resist Jacob Elordi sat on a giant rabbit? As viral as myxomatosis.

As Blazy explained before the show: “I was thinking about Elliott and E.T. in Elliott’s room, the golden light through the slats. A key scene for me is when the mother enters the room with all the stuffed toys, and E.T. is in the middle of them.”

Appropriately, the seats accompanied a collection defined by Blazy as channelling the childlike “power of wow”. Although it was only five shows later and would prove to be his final Bottega offering, “quiet power” had amplified somewhat.

“Everything starts with a video I saw in NYC many years ago,” said Blazy. “The video is a concert performance of classical music, and a young boy exclaims, ‘Wow!’ It’s an instinctive, simple response to something so beautiful. I was thinking of the power of the ‘wow’. The child-like enthusiasm, the adventurousness and the celebration of the idea of wonder as an adult. That’s how I put the collection together – I asked myself, ‘Would I say wow?’”

In the collection, a new kind of power dressing is evoked: the power of sincerity, playfulness and chic awkwardness, of characters discovering who they are through clothing and accessories by remembering who they once were – a coming-of-age and becoming something else. Mainly misproportioned and oversized, like a kid playing dress up in adult clothing, among other things, the collection tackles masculine tailoring with perverse aplomb, and archetypal garments, so frequently looked at by Blazy’s Bottega, are amplified. “I wanted there to be things you instantly recognise,” said the designer. “Something archetypal. The best representation is something obvious. It’s meaningful.”

Although nobody was aware of it at the time, looking back, it felt like the perfect show for Blazy to bow out of Bottega, with his and our sense of wonder intact. It also featured perhaps his best and most emotive soundtrack – each was distinctly evocative for their particular collection, painstakingly put together by Pierre Debusschere. For now, Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel beckons. 

Hair: Shiori Takahashi at Streeters. Make-up: Laura Dominique at Liberte using CHANEL. Model: Cole Mohr at Next Management. Casting: Piotr Chamier at Streeters. Photographic assistants: Terry Broadbent and Céline Bodin. Styling assistants: Eli Richards and Nathan Fox. Production: Holmes Production. Post-production: Dtouch London

This story features in the Summer/Autumn 2025 issue of Another Man, which is on sale internationally from April 24. Order here.