You Could Probably Look at the Bottega Veneta Summer 2024 For Hours and Hours and Hours

Ever since Matthieu Blazy sent that tank top and jeans (that wasn’t actually just a tank top and jeans, but rather a look crafted entirely out of leather), down his first-ever runway as creative director of Bottega Veneta, we can’t help but wonder: How will he play with the material next? Vanessa Friedman crowned him the “magician of Milan,” and consuming his collections can feel a bit, “I can’t believe it’s not butter,” but make it fashion.

Since taking over the house in 2021 (and working there since 2020), Blazy’s been concerned primarily with materiality — innovating, subverting, highlighting, playing around with it. He’s excelled in his leather and knit work, less concerned with generating buzz than with challenging the expectations we have for our clothing. (Though, he’s done both pretty successfully.) At his Summer 2024 show, staged during Milan Fashion Week on Saturday, Blazy proved that his greatest strength actually lies in stoking desire for essentials and other pieces that shoppers might already be familiar with or even already own, but that, in his hands, feel absolutely spectacular.

You might see a concept at a Bottega Veneta show that you’ve seen on countless other runways, like a black suit or a white tee — however, here, it reads as something special, as something uniquely Bottega, in the way it’s fit, in its shape, in how it’s styled. It’s never doing too much, but it feels exactly right.

Every fashion week, we see a lot of brands shows what are marketed as “timeless staples”. This can not only feel repetitive, but oxymoronic: If a button-down is supposed to be timeless and a staple, why would the customer need a new one every three to six months? (The oversimplified answer: Brands just have to sell things.) What Bottega Veneta does, interestingly, is rid itself of this idea of needing a “new” trouser, a “new” blouse, a “new” coat, and instead introducing pieces that you might not have even known were essential, but feel it. When it does present an update of one of these classics — the shirt, the trench, the fringed skirts — it reads as totally separate from its previous iterations. It lives alongside it, not in its place. It doesn’t concern itself too much with seasonality, either: It’s a summer collection, so there are a handful of pieces that feel primed for warm weather (especially the onesies and oversized woven totes that opened the show), but it’s more so about what’s interesting to the brand now. And that could mean coats, or it could mean leather dresses.

What Blazy will do is expand on the techniques and embellishments he’s already established as part of his Bottega Veneta design language, such as fringed hems and tufts of knit that you can almost feel just by looking at them. These collections are texturally rich — it’s clear even from afar and through a computer screen. One can only imagine how much there is to discover when you come across one of these pieces in real life. Now that’s something special.

See every single look from Bottega Veneta Summer 2024, below.