Bottega Veneta Fall 2011 Review
Photos: Imaxtree
Looks from the Bottega Veneta Fall 2011 collection
SHOW: Bottega Veneta (See the full runway collection)
ACCESSORIES: High T-strap sandals in lace; patchwork satchels and totes in hyper-luxurious fabrics
OVERALL TAKEAWAY: Hitchcock meets Hermès in a dusty Italian atelier
Tomas Maier’s latest Bottega Veneta Fall/Winter collection was reportedly inspired by the idea of teetering between restraint and exuberance. That kind of makes sense. Maier used buttoned-up, buckled-in bourgeois ’60s silhouettes as the blank canvas for a collection that played with extravagant surface texture.
This season, Maier showed no trousers. He’s not alone in that: Prada was also defiantly pantless for Fall and also trod a ’60s path. But whereas Prada was about hyper-modernism, Maier’s take on the decade looked much more lived in, sometimes to the point of decomposition. Witness tea-stained, hand-painted, and overprinted textiles, occasionally veiled with strips of lace, often left raw edged and rendered in arts-and-craftsy shades of rust, ocher, and bright green.
“We wanted to push the boundaries, to experiment with technique and craftsmanship to an extreme degree," Maier explained, stating that the clean and uncomplicated silhouette was the right base for this kind of artisan work.
How exactly the bulky ball gowns that closed the show fit into this clean-and-crisp collection, or indeed Maier’s overarching aesthetic of contemporary woman, is something of a mystery. Hopefully red carpets are more ready for his delicious, dishabille dentelle slips tied with a velvet ribbon—quite the most seductive thing we’ve seen in Milan all season.
SEE THE FALL 2011 RUNWAY COLLECTIONS.
