Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta: On Journeys, Craft, and Quiet Confidence
By Mackenzie Richard Zuckerman
Louise Trotter emerged from her debut at Bottega Veneta with an air of composure that felt both hard-won and quietly radiant. There was none of the hurried elation that can follow a first show, but rather the calm satisfaction of someone who had prepared deeply and delivered. After embracing CEO Leo Rongone and Kering’s Laurent Claquin, she turned to the small circle of journalists and editors — those fortunate enough to be granted access — and spoke with the kind of articulate, unhurried confidence that suggested she’d just scored the winning shot and was already thinking about the next play.
“This show was really about the journey and the life of Bottega Veneta,” she began. “I wanted to speak to its story through what I discovered coming into the house — meeting the people, spending time with the artisans, looking through the archives. I started at the beginning: the early period between 1966 and 1977. There I found a soft functionality in the bags, a liberation of women at that time, and a bold confidence — the kind of confidence it takes to wear a bag without a logo.”
That spirit of discovery was personal as well as institutional. “When I first arrived in Milan, I found it quite grey, austere, even brutal in its architecture. Slowly, I began to see the beauty inside. That’s something I wanted to express with this show — the beauty you discover once you look closer.”
Materials and silhouettes reflected this duality of inside and outside. “I worked with beautiful Italian wools, with tailoring principles taken from men’s suiting and applied to dresses. All the dresses were built on a canvas so they fell off the body, like a T-shirt. There were also satins and leathers,” she explained. “The silhouette I wanted to speak to first was close to the body — a bust, a waist, a hip — repeated several times. In contrast, when I was in Montebelluna with the artisans, I saw piles of leather surrounding them as they worked. I wanted to give that feeling, that nod to how something begins — piles of material constructed from the inside out.”
There was also a triangle of references anchoring her vision: Veneto, Milan, and New York. “Bottega Veneta was born in the Veneto, with its colors, its materials, its industrial past,” she said. “But I also imagined an arch-Italian woman — someone like our founder — moving to New York, working with Andy Warhol at the Factory, experiencing a liberation. That was the energy I wanted to capture.”
Throughout, Trotter spoke not in slogans but in gestures — connecting the craft to the human hand, linking liberation to confidence, and weaving her own arrival into the house’s story. When The Impression’s Kenneth Richard told her, at the close of the conversation, “I think you just created your best friend,” she smiled, taking it as the compliment it was.
In this debut, Trotter positioned Bottega Veneta not as a static institution but as a living character — its journey intertwined with her own. The result was a collection that felt like an introduction and an invitation at once: grounded in history, attentive to craft, but already moving confidently toward a freer future.
