Louise Trotter’s Bottega Veneta Is in Full Bloom

Louise Trotter’s third Bottega Veneta collection found warmth and lightness in the house’s extraordinary craft

Flowers have been kind of a thing this season. Florals for spring, and all that. Louise Trotter left a handmade leather one – a parrot tulip, a lily, what I thought was a ranunculus but turned out to be a peony (I’m not an expert) – on every seat of her Spring/Summer 2027 Bottega Veneta show. Christian Lacroix used to do the same at the couture for his audience to pelt him with adoringly. Everyone today, rather, adored Trotter’s and took them home. Different times.

Yet the meaning was similar – the idea of a love token, an emblem of affection, something to be passed between. There’s a generosity to the gesture, which ties in really with a Bottega Veneta attitude, the idea of craft as an expression of humanity. Which could’ve seemed kind of hackneyed a few years ago yet, in an age of rampant AI and dancing robots, resonates anew. There’s also the argument that every brand is trying to make people fall in love, just a little bit, at a time when that’s proving increasingly tricky. Trotter’s take on Bottega Veneta is warm and cuddly, her volumes inviting embrace – much as the resin-coated cardboard box seats of her set, executed by the artist Illya Goldman Gubin, were each a bit squished by the force of the artist’s embrace. Hey, who doesn’t want a hug? Platonic cuddling is a real (and paid) thing.

The cliché of summertime flowers was also a notion. Trotter was interested in the passing of seasons, the difference you feel in your body as the atmosphere shifts – again, pertinent in a moment in the climate crisis, especially when Trotter was thinking of peeling away the layers she so loves. “De-robing” was a word she used backstage. And while this show was covered-up by any standards, there was a sense of things coming apart a little – certainly, of lightening up. That is natural for a designer reaching her third season, settling into a groove of what she wants to do and who she wants her Bottega people to be. Summer came across in a softness, an exposure of (some) flesh, neat little sun-shielding hats and vibrant bolts of colour – ultraviolet, fiery red, obviously sunshine yellow – like random shafts of light. 

Inspecting Trotter’s pieces close-up, though, shifts your eye: they literally feel different, something she started to focus on last season and seems to be doubling down on. A voluminous intrecciato tunic may comprise neither leather nor wool but a carbonara of creamy silk-poplin strips. Another burgundy coat, unlined and scooped Renaissance-low across the chest, resembles linen but is actually strips of nappa leather so minute you can see daylight through it when you hold it up. In many cases, until you get your hands on these things, you don’t know what they are, or indeed how light their own hand is. Generally, that lightness proves confounding. Even brightly coloured shirts are cut in silk taffeta rather than cotton, taking a little more weight out in a way that feels relevant and modern – and responsive to feedback from those wearing her clothes.

There was likewise an interplay with nature, bags woven in raw raffia, more of those flowers in nappa. There’s an interesting exchange in those two: luxury designed to age, erode, even decay like a living thing, alongside ephemeral nature paused for eternal posterity. Making is what Bottega Veneta has always been all about – but without silhouette or overt signifiers, it’s also about a designer putting their own imprint on it. Bottega, really, is whatever you make of it. These were warm clothes, although not in the sweaty way. Rather, if you embrace them, they’ll hug you back.