With so many creative director shifts this season, Louise Trotter’s debut at Milan was one of the most anticipated, and for a good reason. She is one of the few women to step into a House of this scale, taking over Bottega Veneta after Matthieu Blazy. Her career spans Joseph, Lacoste, and Carven, alongside earlier years at Calvin Klein, Gap, and Tommy Hilfiger.
In her first months at Bottega Veneta, Trotter worked closely with the archives and artisans in the Veneto because she wanted to understand how pieces from decades ago could still feel relevant today. In the collection notes, she described Bottega as “a workshop where the hand and the heart become one.” Her debut focused on stretching the House’s signatures into new contexts, keeping the core intact but reworking how they’re used. The result is a substantial collection with multiple avenues for clients to explore, from myriad intrecciato interpretations to a wide range of tactile surfaces.
Intrecciato was everywhere: bags, yes, but also coats, outerwear, and sculptural dresses. There were nods to Laura Braggion, the House’s first female creative lead in the 1980s, alongside sharply tailored bombers, Montgomery coats, and shorts that carried a subtle workwear undertone.
Innovation came through in the choice of materials and techniques. Dresses made from recycled fiberglass shimmered with unexpected softness, feather trims gave coats a sense of motion, and intrecciato appeared in scales and placements far from the usual accessories. Wide clogs grounded the looks as part of a broader attempt to rethink proportions and function.
Colour played an equally deliberate role. A sober base of smoky black, pearl white, and slate grey was lifted by moss green coats, butter-yellow knits, strawberry-pink skirts, and a striking flash of tangerine leather. What stood out was not the range of shades themselves, but the precision with which they were deployed, working in service of construction and shifting the mood of each look without distraction.
Louise’s work stood apart from Blazy’s by shifting the attention from spectacle to the practice of making. What Trotter proposed was not a reinvention, but a recalibration anchoring the House in its craft, proving its strength lies not only in emblematic bags but in an entire way of constructing and wearing clothes. As first chapters go, this was a confident one — clear in its foundations, deliberate in its direction, and open enough to suggest that Bottega, under Trotter, will evolve by design rather than by shock.
