Bottega Veneta Resurrects Chic

Chic is not merely an overused word—it’s a misused one. “Chic” has become the meaningless, maligned little term writers fling around as a catchall when they don’t feel like making up their mind about whether something is beautiful or interesting or just trendy.

But chic is also a lost art. If you poke around for the origins of chic—it appeared about the same time as the fashion industry as we know it did, in the late 1800s—there is an emotional heft as well as an intellectual one. It was a quality one possessed, and an attitude or even philosophy that a person significantly cultivated. Most importantly, in the 1930s up through even the 1970s and 1980s, when John Fairchild was running WWD as a chronicle of chic (and called his second memoir Chic Savages!), chic often implied age. When you start to get a few lines around your eyes—that’s when you have something to say about style. That’s when you begin to know yourself, and appreciate yourself at your most complex. Your insecurities soften and self-assurance appears. You have habits formed and relationships (romantic and otherwise) in place. And with money to spend (at last!), you know just how to spend it. You have taste, because you’ve spent the past three or four decades taking in culture, watching the world change, and getting to know what makes you feel good. You know how to let your opinion be known, and you also like to keep a few things to yourself.

Nowadays, we seem only to have two modes: our gorgeous Gen Z youthquake morphing and crackling at TikTok speed…and grannycore. You’ve either seen nothing, or you’ve seen it all.

But what about the riotous, gorgeous, and—yes, let’s do it—chic in-between? Those years which make up most of our lives?!

That was what made Matthieu Blazy’s Summer 2023 Bottega Veneta show on Saturday freaking fantastic. (This was his second collection, after his well-received debut in February.) I kept trying to put my finger on what was so amazing about those layered denims and plaid shirts, and swingy fringe dresses and collarless trench coats beneath layered button-up shirts with dagger collars. And those brown leather shopping bags! Because we’ve seen Demna do tourists and consumers at Balenciaga. (He even gave his models tourist-y shopping bags back in 2019. And he’s done the trickster-denim thing, printing photoreal jeans on viscose so they look like badly-loaded gifs.) And we’ve seen characters and “perverse banality,” as Blazy put it in the release, from the hands of Martin Margiela and Prada. We’ve even seen celebrations of personal style, which Blazy’s show was too, at Gucci.

For one: all those pieces (including the lumberjack shirts!) are printed leather, which is a kind of aggressively opulent luxury that feels extraordinarily contemporary. This isn’t simply an upgrade of a basic into something better; it’s a declaration that everything in the life of a Bottega Veneta customer should simply be the best.

But it was also this sense, in the styling, with models clutching those bags, that this is a woman living her life and living it well. We don’t know what she knows. We don’t know where she’s been or even where she’s going. (Is she happy with the purchase in that brown bag? Who knows!) There was a sense of living mystery in Blazy’s clothes that chicness, in its best and truest form, conveys. It’s the idea of the little black dress—and Blazy had two. When’s the last time you saw a terrific little black dress? (One that didn’t resemble shapewear and wasn’t riddled with cutouts, that is.)

These kinds of questions and secrets and realities make being a woman exciting; they give us privacy and make our inner lives so rich. (I mean, this is true of any great human being, not just women, and to that end the menswear was great, too.) It made me feel what I feel looking at Martin Margiela’s designs for Hermes in the 1990s, and frankly, what I and many other women felt looking at Phoebe Philo’s Celine designs: this is you, elevated. And in Bottega’s case, it is elevated beyond imagination in its exquisite craftsmanship. And it is a little funky, which is to say elevated in a way that only the cultural cognoscenti can appreciate. (And wow, I haven’t even mentioned the blobby set that was designed by Gaetano Pesce!) But it is clothing for a woman who is sophisticated, who’s had experiences, who’s traveled and shopped and knows which Claire Denis films are the best and rolls her eyes a bit at Art Basel but still goes every year a little hopeful for something sublime. She knows herself. She is chic.

Kate Moss strutting along in those nubuck leather jeans and plaid shirt are the whole idea in one look: my God, it’s the coolest supermodel in history…dressed like the coolest supermodel in history. She’s simply her. (And I love that she’s 48. Right in the chic age demographic!) Experimentation and flamboyance are the ruling order of fashion today, and they are fun and indeed important. But the joy and the satisfaction of dressing as the person you have always wanted to be and finally are, and feeling so good in your clothes—there’s nothing like it.

Bottega Veneta Spring 2023

That show was Milan’s out-of-the-ballpark highlight, but a few other shows are worth noting, too. There were promising debuts at Bally, by Rhuigi Villaseñor, and Ferragamo, by Maximilian Davis. I love seeing these young people (Villaseñor is 30 and Davis is 27) at the head of these big schmancy corporate houses, and frankly I expected a bit more corruption from the two of them.

Bally Spring 2023

At Bally, the clothes were sexy (as the designer had promised), and that was certainly fun to see, like a denim shirt tucked into a sequin skirt—c’mon! Who doesn’t love to see that?!—and some great flute bead tops with jeans. Still, some of the cocktail dresses, with wisps of silk at the bust, and the too-high and spindly heels, demonstrated the need for a woman’s eye. I’m not opposed to a man’s idea of what’s sexy—Tom Ford, clearly a reference for Villaseñor, is the boss of it!—but a woman in the mix can tweak things in just the smallest, best way. (It’s like how guys are always wanting women to wear red lingerie, while most women…don’t.) And at Ferragamo, the weirdness that makes Davis one of his generation’s most extreme talents is clearly percolating. Look at the head-to-toe suede suits with little pouch bags, or the sequin tailoring for evening, or the blousy goddess dresses towards the show's end (with a looong fringe bag that dragged through the red clay runway, yowza!). But I wondered if he was trying a bit too hard not to make his bosses nervous; there was a dose of what felt like polite sportswear filler. To heck with that, I say! The world is Davis’s stage, and he ought to seize it.

Ferragamo Spring 2023

Glenn Martens has more than carpe’d his diem at Diesel. The process of spinning and crafting denim, the most straightforward clothing material—one that’s emblematic of fashion’s democratic possibilities in its flexibility, ubiquity, and affordability—into laces, sheared collar dresses (like if Edith Wharton came back and set The Age of Innocence at Berghain!), and sleek acid wash corsets is so out-there-genius that it could almost be read by a fashion critic (hellooo!) as an allegory for the industry itself. But of course, that would be to miss the cool, weird appeal of Martens’s clothes, which is so obviously the point. You’re like: I don’t know if I get this, but I need it. That’s fashion working at its zenith.

Diesel Spring 2023

Rachel Tashjian is the Fashion News Director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Previously, she was GQ’s first fashion critic, and worked as deputy editor of GARAGE and as a writer at Vanity Fair. She has written for publications including Bookforum and Artforum, and is the creator of the invitation-only newsletter Opulent Tips. 

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