Louise Trotter’s debut collection for Bottega Veneta was about a feeling of ‘liberation’

When Louise Trotter was named the successor to Matthieu Blazy at Bottega Veneta after his move to Chanel last December, there was a rare social-media consensus that the Italian house – part of the Kering conglomerate of luxury brands – had made the right hire.

Part of this was because the Sunderland-born designer comes with pedigree: stints at Joseph, Lacoste and Carven garnered wide acclaim, and, more importantly, meant she had experience leading a brand and design team. The other was that she would be a rare woman creative director in a still male-dominated role – a zeitgeisty topic after a viral Instagram post by London-based magazine 1 Granary in 2023, which called out Kering for having (at that point) white men in every creative director role at its roster of fashion brands.

Inside Louise Trotter’s Bottega Veneta debut

‘We hear so much about “change”, while diversity and equality are used as marketing strategies every day,’ 1 Granary wrote, the post coming in response to the news of Seán McGirr’s hire at McQueen, another brand in the Kering roster (he replaced Sarah Burton, who is now at Givenchy). ‘But in truth, nothing seems to have evolved.’ It garnered over 23,000 likes, and was widely shared; a later post from the magazine announcing Trotter’s appointment was captioned ‘YEEEEEESSSSS!!!!!’, followed by a trail of clapping emojis (the comments section was equally effusive).

This afternoon in Milan, nine months or so since that day, Trotter made her much-anticipated debut for the house at Fabbrica Orobia, a former industrial facility where Bottega Veneta has shown for some seasons (with Blazy tending to hold his shows in the evening, it was refreshing to see the space lit this time by sunlight). Chains and webs crafted from leather hung, installation-style, around the space, while cuboid glass stools in shades of moss green, yellow, navy, and grey made seats for an all-star front row that included Uma Thurman and campaign star Lauren Hutton.

The soundtrack was an ‘audio artwork’ by British artist Steve McQueen. He said he wanted to ‘heighten people's emotions, to make them more sensitive to the clothes’, with the piece, which was titled ‘’66 – ‘76’ and mashed up Nina Simone and David Bowie’s versions of Wild Is the Wind, recorded in 1966 and 1976 respectively. Fittingly, the first was recorded the same year Bottega Veneta was founded: with 2026 marking the house’s 60th anniversary, Trotter said she wanted to ‘return to the beginning to find the present’. Meanwhile, McQueen described the spliced-together voices as an ‘aural intrecciato’, a reference to the leather weaving technique synonymous with Bottega Veneta, which celebrates its own 50th anniversary this year with a series of celebrations, including a Harrods pop-up.

‘The language of Bottega Veneta is intrecciato. And it is a metaphor,’ said Trotter. ‘It is two different strips woven together that become stronger – the two things make a stronger whole. Collaboration and connectivity run throughout this house and its history, from its beginnings to what it is now. It’s about different places, different people, male and female – individual parts and stories intertwined to make a stronger whole.’

Indeed, intrecciato was utilised as a technique and motif throughout the collection, which juxtaposed regal silhouettes – broad-shouldered overcoats were worn with high-neck white blouses beneath, which evoked historical ceremonial attire – with more frenetic plays with colour and texture, like a series of dresses and skirts constructed from a colourful fabric comprising thousands of iridescent strands, which bounced and shimmered as models walk (one editor likened the effect to the fibre-optic lamps popular in the 1990s). After the show, she said she was ‘in the candy box’ as a designer – Bottega Veneta has a superlative atelier when it comes to both leather work and fabric innovation, something the designer here used to striking effect.

Thematically, the idea of freedom has run throughout the week so far – most notably at Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons talked about designing clothes for a woman’s ‘authority and agency’. For this opening collection, Trotter sought a similar idea of liberation through an imagined journey for this season’s protagonist: from Venice, the birthplace of Bottega Veneta, to New York and Milan. ‘The extravagance of Venice; the energy of New York; the essentialism of Milan,’ described the collection notes, something which was in part derived from a study of Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead, who worked from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

‘She was part of Andy Warhol's team. She was in The Factory,’ Trotter elaborated backstage. ‘I was imagining her journey – her freedom of being an Italian woman, an archetypal Italian woman, moving to New York. And what that experience meant. It was a liberation for her. And that's really what I wanted to capture – a feeling of liberation.’

Catch up on highlights from Milan Fashion Week S/S 2026 here.