How to reboot a fashion house

Every now and then a designer puts on a show that is so amazingly good that everything else pales in comparison. This was Matthieu Blazy’s second stint at Bottega Veneta, the €1.5 billion leather goods brand he took over after his former boss Daniel Lee left last year.

This season, Blazy has teamed up with 82-year-old Italian architect Gaetano Pesce, who designed the showroom’s colorful resin floor and also designed the hundreds of bright, blocky resin chairs that are lined up for guests. “The idea was to really represent [human] diversity . . . different characters and place them in the landscape of Gaetano,” Blazy said backstage.

What he offered was a complete wardrobe, shown on a cast of models, not all of whom were in their first frenzy of youth and all the more interesting for it. His wardrobe began with the casual, or what Blazy called “perverted banality”: T-shirts and faded shirts with chinos and baggy jeans made not of cotton and wool but of leather, each covered in eight to twelve prints to create depth, and then shaved thin, Blazy said. Smart workwear followed: single-breasted suits with trousers swept back and sewn in a gentle arc behind the calf, as if suspended in mid-air; immaculately tailored blazer dresses and coats that puff out at the hips; and for the evening, knitted dresses and pantsuits in a mix of patterns and fringes inspired by the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla.

As well as looking great and invitingly wearable, the clothes were strategically placed to underscore Kering’s own brand unique selling points – its leather craftsmanship and also, according to Blazy, its legacy as the ‘bag company’ it associates with travel and the Idea of ​​“going somewhere”. Hence the curved trousers and the fringes on the shoulders, skirts and trouser hems. Each of these garments would be recognizable by Bottega in a store, no logo required.

His approach offered lessons for the designers, who made their debuts with other labels in Milan this week. Expectations were highest for Ferragamo, the 95-year-old Florentine shoemaker who is now helmed by former Burberry chief executive Marco Gobbetti and Maximilian Davis, a 27-year-old from Manchester and the first black designer to hold the creative director position at House .

In recent years, family-run Ferragamo has ceded market share to larger rivals and become a small fish in an ever-growing pond, and turning things around won’t be an easy task. Sales totaled €1.14 billion last year, still below pre-pandemic earnings.

The family has urged Davis to be “as risky as possible,” he said backstage, and the show had all the sparkle of a big debut, with a palace for a set having its floors and walls covered in an orangey red, and Ferragamo’s new, all-caps, subtly seriffed Peter Saville-designed logo, blown up opposite the entrance.

By hiring such a young designer, the Ferragamo family hopes to attract a younger client, but Davis designed for a range. There were bandeau tops and cropped skirts, of course, but the emphasis was on tailoring and the kind of jet-set chic sportswear perfected by Michael Kors and Tom Ford. The form-fitting, backless suede dresses were livelier and more energetic than what came before Davis, but they didn’t wow. And Ferragamo needs to inspire to cut through the noise of its much larger and better funded rivals.

New Missoni designer Filippo Grazioli, who worked under Riccardo Tisci at both Burberry and Givenchy, certainly wanted to impress. His debut collection was short, sheer, and glittery, but her flat, bodycon dresses and chevron- and zebra-print miniskirts did little to showcase the house’s rich savoir-faire.

For his first Etro show, Marco de Vincenzo, who also designs accessories for Fendi, didn’t play up the label’s signature paisley, instead enlarging its logo and embroidering it onto the pockets of striped shirts, the corners of skirts and the sides of upcycled carpet bags from last season’s fabrics. The problem with this approach is that Etro doesn’t have enough brand equity to make the logo universally desirable – de Vincenzo has a lot to do to get it there.

It seems that just being a leather goods brand is no longer enough today – those that have successfully become luxury fashion houses, such as Louis Vuitton and Hermès, sell more handbags than specialized handbag brands and more shoes than shoemakers. And so, Swiss leather goods label Bally is trying its hand at fashion again, hiring Los Angeles-based designer Rhuigi Villaseñor to put together its first runway collection in 21 years. His suede suits and flattering low-cut dresses would feel right at home in LA, but they didn’t help establish a clear identity for the brand.

Versace and Dolce & Gabbana have both focused on the power of celebrity and the fashion of the ’90s and early ’90s this season. Donatella Versace cast OG influencer Paris Hilton in a vaguely vampiric show of black waterfall dresses, purple boudoir dresses and dark eyeliner. Dolce & Gabbana partnered with Kim Kardashian in what it calls “curation” rather than collaboration: she selected archival pieces from 1987 to 2007, which the designers reworked slightly by inserting a tag into the garment with the year of their original creation sewed. There were corsets and stretchy dresses, silky cargo pants, and head-to-toe leopard print — all items Kardashian might wear. In a glittering jet evening dress, she bowed to the designers while her mother and three of her children watched from the front row.

It was clever marketing and a moment of light-hearted fun in a week marred by the national election. On the final Sunday of the show, Italians headed to the polls where they were expected to vote for a right-wing coalition that is quietly worrying many in the Italian fashion industry. Armani’s closing show offered another moment of calm with her elegant, light trousers, embroidered jackets and shimmering evening dresses in soft, pale colors. After a week of so many Gen Z focused shows, it was nice to see adult clothing.

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