It’s amazing how so few designers realize the abject appreciation they’ll be given for allowing women a glimpse of simple, reserved, perfectly cut tailoring. From the moment Jamie Bochert opened the Bottega Veneta show wearing a long black cashmere coat, black turtleneck, slim, very slightly flared pants, and a long and skinny knitted scarf wound around her neck, Tomas Maier should have felt the audience love radiating all the way backstage. Anyway: With this season, he has come to his senses, dispensed with theme (who needs it?) and applied himself the one thing which is so frustratingly elusive to find in today’s hotchpotch fancied-up fashion: a method for looking grown-up, and proud of it.
In the febrile celebrity model–spotting atmosphere of the shows in Milan, it was notable that this time, it was Brochart and the dignified Julia Nobis (dressed in a pale beige cashmere pantsuit) who magnetized envious eyes. Kendall Jenner was there on the runway later, too, wearing a purple knit dress that made her look considerably older than her years. But essentially, this is a collection which separates the women from the girls. You suddenly realized that you must aspire to be old enough to wear these clothes—and how many collections can make a woman feel positively relaxed and smug about that?
Maier is a middle-aged man who has no fear of looking at his female counterparts and figuring out what’s in their minds and where they've come from. Looking closely at such things as the leopard-spot pony-skin coat, or the ochre and black belted cardigan, and the proportions of the pants, with the silvered high heel boots beneath, you could read subtle messages being bleeped to the consciousness of a generation; the ineffable chic of a mother or grandmother’s ’50s wardrobe; the hidden nod to teen memories of what felt good about the ’70s. Though so subsumed into modern fabrics—a cool black crunched-up plastic coat, a tweed subtly glinting with minute, transparent sequins—that nothing could be found on a vintage market. There comes an age when you don’t want to retrofit yourself to old clothes.
That is Maier’s other strength—he is a fanatic about pushing modern techniques. New Italian machinery has brought about a revolution in knitting—it almost seems too crude a term, now, to describe the waisted, full-skirted, almost lingerie-fine dresses he engineered for this collection. They were followed by yet more innovation: pintucked dresses in smoky chiffon, layered over fine satin underdresses, printed with tiny flowers. Amid all this, he also showed a lovely selection of Deco-influenced necklaces, drop earrings, brooches, and barrettes with green stones—a gesture which still further signaled the impression that Maier is speaking to a woman who has earned the wherewithal to put herself together. All in all, this was a triumph.
