admin Phelps also asked the French Belgian designer about his sting at Maison Martin Margiela in the early 2010s, a position that was anonymous, until he was famously “outed” by the journalist Suzy Menkes. “When they called me at Margiela, a lot of people told me ‘Martin is not in the house anymore, it’s a dead zone, you’re not going to do anything there,’ so I took it as a super challenge and an opportunity,” he explained. “It was all about transformation: you would cut into a perfect jacket and make a skirt out of it. You would take cans and turn (them) into a shoe. Everything was a possibility.” Of the experience of working anonymously versus now being a very known industry star, he added mischievously, “the only thing that changed is that sometimes people call you ‘Matthieu’, and you don’t know who they are and that’s a little weird.”
The designer also recalled the thought process behind the look that opened his first Bottega Veneta collection: a white tank top and a pair of light wash jeans, both of which turned out to be made of leather; something that many in the audience—including Phelps—didn’t realize until it was pointed it out at the after-show dinner. “And had he not told me that, I would’ve written a completely different review,” she said as the room filled with laughter.
“The thing with Bottega is that it’s all about craft, and a lot of people see craft as something very dusty or overworked, and when we sat down with the team I said, ‘let’s do something mega-craft that is also extremely real.” Blazy continued, “I kept on thinking about Natalie Portman when she walked in the final scene from Closer, she’s wearing a tank top and a pair of jeans and the confidence is amazing. Everyone looks at her and the outfit is the most basic. And just to trick the story a little bit, I challenged the team to realize it fully in leather. It took time, it was really complicated, but the result was so simple and I liked the idea that no one (noticed it) and I also thought there was something quite perverted in the idea that you can only realize (they are) leather if someone touched you or you’re getting touched. There was something quite erotic about it.”
