Italian fashion brand BOTTEGA VENETA presented its Fall Winter 2023 Collection, that fuses mythology with futurism, on February 25th, during the ongoing Milan Fashion Week. The collection explores an idea of a parade in Italy, and it features references from Italian culture – from ancient Roman bronze runners (1BC) to Boccioni’s Futurist ‘Unique Forms of Continuity in Space’ (1913). Designer Matthieu Blazy uses craft as innovation, and reinterprets historical silhouettes in a contemporary way. This is the third show in the brand’s “Italia” trilogy of shows, that celebrate the past present and future of Italy.
FALL WINTER 2023.24 COLLECTIONS
I loved the idea of the parade in Italy; a procession, a strange carnival, a crowd of people from anywhere and everywhere and yet somehow, they all fit and go in the same direction. I wanted to look at what makes people gather together in a place without hierarchy, where everyone is invited. – Matthieu Blazy
“The odyssey of the cast continues, and yet they are now character archetypes in transformation, mutable and moving, travelling from the ordinary to the extraordinary. There is a questioning of what it means to be chic and when it starts. From the morning ritual of the bombshell in her transparent white chemise and bed socks (that dress belies its material complexity while those socks are knitted leather shoes) to the sartorially obsessed industrialist in his pinstriped nightshirt or ‘grey flannel’ pyjamas (all fully realised in nappa leather). There is an exploration of the idea of ‘getting changed’ from its everyday meaning in the early silhouettes to its more fantastical promises later on, where a new mythology takes shape. The parade is a place of priests and playboys, sleepwalkers and streetwalkers with sirens of the screen and the ancient seas. Above all, it is a place where there is the joyful, emotional and personal pleasure of dressing up, of gaining the confidence to be whoever the wearer wants to be through clothing.” – from Bottega Veneta