On a Thursday night in spring, the lobby of the Hotel Danieli, near Piazza San Marco in Venice, stirs awake and, with the twilight at its windows, comes to life in dazzling evening dress. Women weave between the furniture in yellow suits and beautifully draped dresses. Men tread the stone floors and Old World rugs in interesting shoes. The travellers are glamorous and restless, with a charge of misbehaviour spilling out on to the edge of the canals. Venice, the unchanging city, seems in the thrall of energy that is brand-new.
Matthieu Blazy of Bottega Veneta appears as if from nowhere and whirls down the hotel’s main staircase toward the crowd below. He is tall, with cropped light-brown hair, and wears a loose tan summer suit – double-breasted, open, with the sleeves rolled up – over a black T-shirt. His shoes are of soft woven leather and his manner is of lucid confidence. Late last year, at 37, Blazy was named creative director of Bottega Veneta, after a career that looked to many people like a game of hiding in plain sight. (As the artist Sterling Ruby, who has worked closely with Blazy, says, “I just thought: it’s about time.”) He had been hired out of school by Raf Simons before moving on to work at Maison Martin Margiela and Céline, where he was known for a pragmatic understanding of the market and an interest in ambitious art. Before ascending to the helm of Bottega Veneta, Blazy was its design director – the No2 post, behind Daniel Lee, who departed suddenly last year – and says that little in his working habits changed with the promotion. (“I like to work in teams,” he says. “It’s not me facing products and giving opinions.”) “There’s something egalitarian about the way he works,” the artist Anne Collier, who designed a fragrance alongside Blazy, says. “He’s not an egomaniac or hyper-narcissist or mega-diva or anything like that.” Simons: “Matthieu is, I think, one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met in my life.”
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He is also, it turns out, a hard man to keep up with. As the crowd in the Danieli grows, he is suddenly gone, out the hotel’s small side door, where a water taxi purrs in waiting. It’s a cool night and rain, from some low clouds over the harbour, has begun to fall. At the Punta della Dogana, a curious triangular outcropping that was once home to a Venetian customs house, he docks and scrambles ashore toward a building that serves as a museum for the art collection of François Pinault, whose company, Kering, acquired Bottega Veneta in the early 2000s. It’s the eve of the Venice Biennale and Bottega is hosting a dinner for important guests. A video work by the artist Bruce Nauman spans two of the gallery’s white walls and the evening has the crisp mood of investiture: a luxury conglomerate introducing its newest, long-hidden prince.
Since arriving, Blazy’s approach has been to lean toward specificity and art as a relief from the online social churn – or, as he puts it, “How many influencers can really influence something that has been influenced already 5,000 times before?” Luxury, in the end, means lasting quality. “There’s a multi-lifetime depth in his decision-making – something that exists outside of time and space,” Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), who was an early admirer of Blazy’s work, tells me. “I think it’s super-important in this post-hype Instagram moment that deeply connected individuals have light shined on their platform… It’s time for a reset.”
At dinner, Blazy stands to give a self-effacing welcome speech; then, by dessert, he has vanished once again. “It is my favourite feeling in the world when you go to a new city, leave the hotel and start wandering around,” he tells me over coffee the next morning at Caffè Florian, an exquisitely time-worn 18th-century coffee house. After the dinner, he confesses, he stayed out with friends until 3am. As we finish our second coffee, he hustles me across the square to the Olivetti typewriter showroom, a mid-century jewel box of glass, concrete, wood and brass by the architect Carlo Scarpa. It is his favourite space anywhere, he says, for “the modernity, the relevance and the timelessness”.
“Bottega Veneta is a bag company,” he tells me with a welcoming smile, as if this will explain everything, before vanishing into the throngs of Piazza San Marco. “It means that you go places – it’s as simple as that.”
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Blazy is himself a child of movement and the unlikely juxtapositions it makes in a life. Born in Paris, he grew up with an art-specialist father and a historian mother, and spent his childhood hanging about auction houses and absorbing their eclectic range. He describes himself as being imaginative, restless and undisciplined. “I wasn’t interested in school. I had some great teachers, but I hated the notion of exercises,” he says. “I was quite wild. Therefore, I was sent to a kind of priest institution in the middle of nowhere in France” (a Marist boarding school in the region of Ardèche). By 15, it was on to military school in England, a not unpleasant experience. “The more boundaries you have, the more freedom you can find in the small things,” Blazy says.
At 16, he was allowed to return to Paris, where he enrolled at an international school with students of many different backgrounds. He loved it, falling in with a tribe of kids interested in fashion, a number of whom remain his friends. “I never wasn’t interested in fashion,” he recalls. A neighbour ran a modelling agency and he would watch the first crop of ’80s supermodels pass through the common garden. In time, he learned to riffle through the magazine-recycling bin, poring over the titles left behind: i-D, The Face, Vogue. Blazy enrolled at La Cambre, the design academy in Brussels. “The system was almost like Bauhaus: you had a fashion course, but you also learned about music, art, semiology, semantics. You absorbed a lot,” he says. As a student, he interned in the womenswear department of Balenciaga, under Nicolas Ghesquière, and entered the International Talent Support competition in Trieste, with judges including Raf Simons and the fashion critic Cathy Horyn. “We thought, ‘Oh, this is as clear as water. He’s the winner!’” Simons says. “And then he didn’t win. I said to him, ‘What are you gonna do? Because I would love for you to come work for me.’
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“Matthieu is a very free spirit, almost hippie-like in his mind,” Simons says now. “Sometimes you have people around you and they only make what you’ve talked about, but he’s very daring, never afraid to show something quite experimental.” For Simons, this meant a fast, generative kind of work. “I can say whatever I want to Matthieu and it will never really piss him off. Like, ‘Oh, no. I find that a ridiculous idea. Please, no way!’ He doesn’t mind, because he’s so free. And then he brings amazing things.”
One of Blazy’s new colleagues on the team was Pieter Mulier, now Blazy’s long-time partner and the creative director at Alaïa. Mulier was among those to interview Blazy (“He was extremely nervous, poor thing”) and had been puzzled and moved by the way he presented his portfolio: designers usually bring images of their work, but Blazy showed up with his whole collection in tow – he wanted people to be able to handle the garments. Blazy had made everything himself and Mulier was struck by his technical and geometric skill. “When you look at Raf’s collections after he arrived, they become pattern-wise much more complicated, much more intricate, and that’s because of him,” Mulier says. After moving in together, they began co-collecting art and vintage garments – all periods, all sorts of pieces – many of which they’ve used for inspiration. At the start of their 16-year relationship, they discussed work all the time. Lately, hardly at all. “During collections, I don’t show him anything and he doesn’t show me anything,” Mulier says. “Otherwise we would go crazy.”
During the 2010s, Mulier remained a Simons deputy, while Blazy made an industry tour. On the anonymous Maison Margiela team, he was outed as creator of the crystal-studded masks that became a famous feature of Kanye West’s 2013 Yeezus tour. “I gravitated to it emotionally,” Ye says. “Interestingly enough, I used to be shy to wear those masks in public and only wanted to wear them onstage, until I embraced that the world was a stage.” At Phoebe Philo’s Céline, he worked not on the main lines but on the pre-collections, the better to experience commercial pressure. All the while, he and Mulier remained close to Simons, whose house in the south of France they still visit during off weeks – and whose counsel in pet ownership they sought after acquiring a black dog called John John. “My dog is best friends with their dog!” Simons exclaims. “She – my dog – taught their little boy to swim.”
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When Blazy and Mulier took the helms, respectively, of Bottega Veneta and Alaïa in 2021, the new roles brought new pressures to their shared life. “Let’s say it’s not the easiest. Sometimes I don’t see him for three weeks or for a month,” Mulier says. “We’ve always worked together for each other’s goals and it’s quite peculiar that we realised our dreams at the same moment.” They always worked long hours, but now the public – and the corporate – perception of success or failure hung from their names. They know the stakes. In 2016, Blazy and Mulier moved to New York to join Simons at Calvin Klein, where he’d been hired as chief creative officer. The label was a behemoth, with a fast churn of collections; Blazy and Mulier designed piece after piece and helped launch its redesigned flagship, at 654 Madison Avenue.
In 2018, though, tension between Simons and the brand’s corporate leaders brought the project to a sudden halt, and Blazy and Mulier left not merely disappointed but creatively demoralised. Blazy took time off, unsure whether to continue in the trade. “I was really questioning: why do you like to do this job? Why did I start in this job?” He went out to Los Angeles to visit Sterling Ruby and his wife, Melanie Schiff, who were making clothing in Ruby’s studio and pitched in.
“The pleasure of just making, just working on clothes and silhouettes without any commercial idea,” Blazy recalls, “really got me back on track.” By the time he became Bottega Veneta’s creative director, he knew his mission. “When I took over the job, I sat with the team – designers, but also people at the company for 20 years – and asked ourselves a simple question: what is Bottega?” he says. “What is craft and where does it sit in tradition? How can we bring modernity? We didn’t talk about shape. We didn’t talk about image. It was the feeling of the brand.” Know where you started, he thought, and you could go anywhere.
In Milan, Blazy wakes early and walks to the office, stopping with John John at the dog park on the way. He tries to be at his desk soon after 8am – he works best in the morning – and usually doesn’t leave before 8pm. “By then, my brain is burned,” he says. One day, he interrupts his work to meet me at the Bottega Veneta showroom in the shadow of the National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci, where his newest collections hang on carefully curated racks. “I like when clothes look kind of architectural – they should look sexy on the hanger,” says Blazy. At La Cambre, he learned to design in the round and this is how he still works: starting with a pile of interesting fabrics, studying how pieces move and feel, and refining until each garment comes alive. This intuitive approach produces results at once unprecious and unexpected. Blazy is known for setting patterns at unusual angles, substituting unorthodox fabrics and cutting unconventional forms that, on the human body, drape in beautiful and naturalistic ways. “The clothes aren’t necessarily your first idea of what might be flattering,” says Anne Collier. “And then they are, incredibly.”
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As we wander the showroom, Blazy pulls a bag off the shelf. “You see the master craftsmanship,” he says. “It has no seams.” The basket-like weave of this particular bag tapers through a single brass ring into a thick, rope-like handle meant to be slung over the shoulder. Every one must be woven by hand, which means that no two are identical. “That’s luxury,” Blazy says. This bag, Blazy tells me, turning it over, was inspired by the Italian cartoon character of Calimero, a chicken carrying his belongings in a tramp bindle. “It’s the bag that opened the show,” he notes.
That first show, in February, was heralded as a triumph of traditionalism and innovation. The opening look: a young woman in a white tank top, relaxed-fit blue jeans and sensible black heels, striding down the runway with a Kalimero bag slung over her shoulder. Or so it seemed: the trousers, delicately tapered, were actually made of soft leather, printed with layers of ink for the appearance of blue jeans. Was this high-concept irony? Or was it just what it seemed: a timeless, unpretentious street look, full of sexiness and function, with the luxury known only to the wearer?
The whole collection shimmered with a similar duality. On the one hand were the dazzling, daring flights: the exquisite trousers in supple leather, moving like silk; the jackets cut like shirts; the coats in mottled wool made to look like the terrazzo floor in Milan’s Malpensa airport; the baleen-like extensions on a classic skirt. On the other was a collection of irresistible wearability. One coat has dynamic, crescentic sleeves; another jacket, meanwhile, is rendered plainly and simply. (“I’m attracted to the fact that it looks completely undesigned,” Blazy says. “It’s… a very well-made jacket. And that’s enough.”) The garments come alive in profile. In preparing, Blazy studied Italian Futurism, particularly the work of Umberto Boccioni, and ruminated on Alberto Giacometti’s “Walking Man”. “We wanted to be bourgeois from the front, not overdesigned – but then when you look at the side, bang!” he says. “That’s our territory, the silhouette.”
As he takes me around the showroom, displaying his latest innovations – a shoe inspired by toxic mushrooms; his forays into yellow and deep green – he keeps returning to the bags. One is called the JJ, because, when he set it on the floor and held the strap, it reminded him of walking John John. Another is inspired by a helmet – not worn on the head but dangled from the hand, a sporty power pose. “It’s a mix between sophisticated and very playful,” Blazy says. His apartment in Milan is a monument to a more personal aesthetic. “It’s a funny story,” he says. “When I got the job, I went online to see what was on the market and saw this apartment for rent. I’m like, ‘I’ve been there.’” He rang the number and was told he could come see it there and then. “I stepped in and was like, ‘I was here maybe 15 years ago, when Raf was at Jil Sander.’ It was his place!” He took it at once.
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The flat is pointedly unrenovated. The floor is dark-green marble, its walls panelled wood. A small stone fireplace with a brass hood and skirt is framed by warm, charcoal-coloured brickwork. Between the entertaining rooms are sliding doors of accordioning black leather and a portion of the ceiling is done in a rectangular lattice – again, suggestive of the intrecciato. “I came here with very little furniture,” Blazy tells me, “thinking, you know, maybe I’m going to build it up with time. But the more I think about it, the more I think I’m going to keep it empty.”
Blazy’s idea of happiness, he says, is stopping by a café after work, having a beer or two and thinking about images as people bustle all around. He takes me to his favourite, Bar Quadronno. When he isn’t actively working, he haunts galleries and auctions, trying to see what’s going on in art. “I’ve wanted to bring Bottega to a place where it’s more part of the cultural aspect of society,” he says. When he was considering leaving fashion, he tells me, he entertained studying to be a curator of art. His loved ones talked him down from the ledge (“Someone in my family said, ‘Stick to your business – you’re quite good’”), but the affection remains. He describes himself as a Sunday painter, blissfully mediocre. (What style does he paint in? I ask. “The style is Sunday painter,” he retorts.)
Blazy orders another spritz, lights another cigarette. What he does is not art, he says – it’s craft – but there is still an extended learning curve. “As you encounter more, you know more what you dislike and are attracted to,” he says. “A few years ago, I would not have been ready to take this job.” He no longer feels that way. Bottega Veneta was not his first creative director offer, he says, but it was the first one that he leapt at with pleasure and no hesitation – the first that arrived when he felt he’d finally reached the end of his long, brilliant apprenticeship. “I was just more confident,” he says, letting his eyes wander to the changing swirl of city life around him. “I was ready to work.”
