BOTTEGA VENETA held its WINTER 2023 runway show in Milan, Italy at 4:00 AM on February 26th (8:00 PM local time on February 25th).

"Parade: The alchemy of the street exists in its diversity. Who will you meet? What's around the corner? Who will surprise you? The surprise of the encounter is what matters."

Mathieu Brazy


With this final show in his "Italian" trilogy, Creative Director Mathieu Brazy continues to celebrate and fuse the country's past, present, and future through craft in motion. In this parade, ancient techniques and motifs, pictorial figures, and creatures transcend time and space, speaking to the present and future. A cacophony of influences, both animate and inanimate, creates a polyphony. Each has its own role and is part of a forward flow, from an ancient Roman bronze runner (1 BC) to Boccioni's Futurist work "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" (1913), and on to the Winter 2023 collection, unveiled today. The show drew inspiration from both ancient mythology and Futurist visions of the future. The cutting that creates the "Boccioni" silhouette, which continues from Blazy's foundation collection and is developed here, is also a truly Futurist form.


The performers' voyage of discovery continues, but now they are shapeshifting archetypes, traveling from the ordinary to the extraordinary. It raises questions about what it means to be chic, and when does it become so? The show begins with a typical morning scene, featuring a seductive woman in a sheer white chemise and bed socks (the dress has a subtle texture, and the socks are made of knitted leather), and a fashion-conscious businesswoman in a pinstripe nightshirt or "gray flannel" pajamas (both made entirely of nappa leather).



The show explores the idea of changing clothes and transforming, from the everyday meaning of the silhouettes in the first half to a more fantastical mood in the second half, creating a new mythology. The parade is a place where priests and playboys, sleepwalkers and street corner prostitutes, silver screen beauties and ancient sea sirens stalk. Above all, it is a place where the joy of dressing up, the joy of personal resonating, and the confidence that clothing can help the wearer become whoever they want to be. In this collection, craft is reimagined as innovation. Historic silhouettes are revived and reinterpreted with plunging necklines, cored silhouettes, slits, and hangings. A contemporary reimagining of Chloris and Flora from Botticelli's "Primavera" (1482) takes a new turn, recreating and repositioning the intricate hand-embroidered silk. Like a Surrealist game of "elegant corpse," the collection and show reveal a vast range of possibilities. Transfigured through cut and craft, chimera-like, fantastical creatures emerge. Shaggy fil coupé jacquard weaves together codes of volume and technique. Intrecciato fabric transforms into scales and feathers, like a new kind of skin, taking on new forms in clothing and leather goods. The new creatures hold sardine bags with handles made from translucent Murano glass, a material that takes on new possibilities as a shapeable material, marking the end of one part of the Bottega Veneta story and the beginning of a new part, a new myth.

"I loved the idea of Italian parades. These processions, these mysterious carnivals. So many people come from nowhere and somehow they all fit together, moving in the same direction. I wanted to explore why people come together in a place where everyone can participate, regardless of class."

Mathieu Brazy