As I rode into Paris on Sunday afternoon, I texted my editor Stella Bugbee for her thoughts on the Bottega Veneta show the night before. I was seeking some perspective. To me, sitting under the venue’s harsh lighting, this collection, the third from the designer Louise Trotter, landed with a plodding thud.
I wondered how it had looked from afar.
“Too cumbersome,” Stella agreed.
She did, though, pick out a model in a businesslike blue dress shirt under a navy sport coat with slouch. His hands plunged into his pockets, a leather newspaper tucked under his arm. As your eye traveled, the outfit picked up pep: brown trousers with a spritz of near-iridescent shimmer, and then a pair of Peep-pink flat shoes. Great shoes can be a trick, a shortcut to reaping compliments when you’re unsure about the rest of your outfit. That’s what these were.
This look had been my favorite, too. It was so much airier than its 60 siblings. It had wit and wearability, characteristics lacking elsewhere. And it was an actual outfit — an outfit we could all print off and copy this week, not just an imposing wall of leather for us to ooh and aah at in a gallery.
Sometimes, the world-class skills of an atelier can hold back a designer. That’s what I think is happening at Bottega under Trotter, who has perhaps been too eager to exploit the resources of a storied leather-goods company capable of making near anything without first figuring out what she had to say.
“Heavy” was a word Stella and I both used to described these looks. Heavy, like a tangerine dress that makes the model appear eaten by a set of curtains. Unwieldy, like a lavender skirt made of looping strands like a komondor’s pelt. Silly, too, with Trotter’s pointy sailor hats (a reduced-fat version of the riotous head wraps the Celine designer Michael Rider put on his male models just a few months ago).
“Luxury has to justify its prices,” Stella said. (Our colleague Vanessa Friedman, in her review, wrote that these intricate details “overcomplicated everything, rather than easing it up.”)
Indeed, trench coats made of crosshatched leather and sweaters with comely, comforter-thick lacing shout “high craft.” But lost in her garden of leather-flowered dresses, Trotter has forgotten that people want to see themselves beneath all those layers.
Other things worth knowing about:
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The show by the designer Maximilian Davis for Ferragamo on Saturday was an overcooked casserole of signifiers from recent Saint Laurent collections: tie-neck blouses on men; translucent, sweat-sealing rubber trench coats and dresses. The loud rumor is that Saint Laurent’s designer, Anthony Vaccarello, will be leaving soon. Some suspected Davis of auditioning for the role from the runway.
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Thanks to all who answered my gripe a couple newsletters ago about Milan’s lackluster shopping by steering me toward the vintage shops on Via Gian Giacomo Mora. Cavalli e Nastri was the standout with its stash of suits and coats from Romeo Gigli, the Italian designer who reigned in the ’80s and whom designers today love to reference.
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If your suit pants don’t look like Ionian columns, you’re doing it wrong.
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The temporary online shop for Cristaseya, the best “if you know, you know” fashion line, is open through Oct. 18. It’s practically mandated by my editors that I visit its showroom in Paris while I’m here. Likewise Charvet. Since Chanel bought it last year, everyone is convinced it’s only a matter of time before the prices for its cashmere scarves and lissome slippers go (even) higher.
What we’re reading, listening to and watching:
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Here’s a podcast for those who lie awake at night wondering if that jingle about Lizzie Borden is historically accurate.
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Could Sylvester Stallone be the true philosopher of our time?
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After that Prada show, Becky Malinsky declared that the skirt had (once again) won.
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The most unnerving factoid to come out of Ari Emanuel’s wall-to-wall press tour? He wants to get Pat McAfee a role in “Heat 2.”
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Fiction from Lauren Oyler, in serialized form. Like the days of Dickens if he had access to dating apps.
The indelible fit of the day
Slayyyter, shipwrecked at the MTV Video Music Awards. See the rest of our style report from the night here.
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