Tomas Maier has a distaste for workout clothes—"horrific spandex outfits," he called them backstage, with an expressive shudder. In keeping with his men's show in June, today's Bottega Veneta collection was about dance. "Wouldn't it be better to work on a ballet barre and focus on posture, instead of your six-pack?" he asked. Well, it would if you could wear Maier's clothes while you're at it. It's the ultimate luxury to buy your sweats from BV.
The show began with glorified activewear—tanks, Henleys, leggings, a chunky sweater to throw over all of them—in pale neutrals and supple, touchable fabrics. You were tempted to reach out and brush your hand against the ice-gray washed suede of a trench. Nobody romances walking-around clothes like Maier did here. But even as the show progressed, he imbued it all with a ballerina's grace: Skirts were long and full above macramé and leather skimmers, and light-as-air gingham cardigans twisted around the torso of matching checked dresses, belting gently at the waist. With her pixie cut and swan neck, a model in a net tank and delicate skirt embroidered with channels of sequins conjured Audrey Hepburn at her sylphiest. If the deluxe workoutwear at the beginning was utterly of the moment, a corrective response to what Maier sees on the street, the dressier pieces had mid-century undertones, a better version of the 1950s. While there was nothing so obvious as an honest-to-goodness tutu, you could see how stage costumes might've inspired the swatches of sequins planted here and there on the front of an otherwise almost humble cotton poplin dress, or the transparent net overlay on a V-neck sheath.
After sweatshirt cotton, denim is the next best comfort fabric, and Maier did a fair bit of experimenting with it here. On other Milan runways, it's been faded and distressed; at BV it was raw, dark, and pressed stiff, with unfinished edges, the implication being that Maier expects you to do the wearing-in yourself. A highly likely prospect.
