Some things we didn’t do in the pandemic: wear 4,000 feathers head-to-toe or a stretch cashmere slip hand knit with 9,500 glass paillettes, pull on a jacket with the pneumatic sheen of a Jeff Koons sculpture, or match our shoes to our bag to our dress. Daniel Lee’s latest for Bottega Veneta is ripe with diversions. The fringed shearling coats that are this collection’s showpieces are cut in the shape of strawberries, or are they cartoon hearts? But there’s whimsy in the more everyday too; the spiral straps of high-heeled sandals were made in coordination with an actual telephone manufacturer. Lee’s clothes and accessories are reminders—lest we forget after months of lockdown and the Delta surge—of the pleasures to be found in dressing up again.
For all the fun Lee and co. are having, though, they’re still quite serious about craft. Peer into any one of the It bags he’s unveiled since arriving at the brand circa 2018 and you’ll see that it’s unlined, like all the rest; the signature intrecciato is as finely rendered on the inside as it is on the outside. Preserving savoir faire seems very much top of mind chez Bottega Veneta these days; press notes of the kind often shared by couturiers revealed that the glass dresses here take between 135 and 250 hours to complete. A black and white zebra stripe coat, meanwhile, features 4.3 million stitches on an embroidery machine; it too is left unlined so the workmanship can be appreciated.
The surprise of those 4,000 feathers is not their numbers, nor the amount of time it took to embroider them (not fewer than 100 hours), but the garments they were affixed to: the stretch denim that Lee and his team developed for the house and cut into an otherwise traditional jacket and jeans. All of the materials used in this collection were developed in-house. There’s no word on whether the intreccio balloon jacket with the Koonsian sheen would actually float in the next climate calamity, and who would dare risk a fashion trophy like that? But the merging of the fabulous and the functional just might be one of the smartest and most satisfying pandemic after-effects on fashion.
