There are only a handful of shows each season, if many, that create the kind of seismic shifts in fashion that last for months or even years. Matthieu Blazy does this consistently, but most notably with his spring/summer 2025 collection, at Bottega Veneta.
On Saturday night in Milan, he presented a collection simply titled “WOW!” Blazy intended it to reflect the childlike wonder, joy and earnestness that inspired his designs, feelings he hoped his clothes would also evoke. “This is about the power of sincerity over strategy,” he wrote, adding, “What would the child in you want?” But it was also an apt description of the reaction to the show. You could almost feel it in the social media feeds of everyone who saw the collection, especially the visitors who arrived to discover that they would be sitting on leather bean bags shaped like animals. (Available for purchase if you’re willing to shell out $6,000.)
The first half of the collection proposed a new idea of power dressing, with at its core the radical idea that you can dress for work without taking yourself too seriously. What if, Blazy suggested, you were just a kid playing dress-up? How would clothes fit you? And who would you want to be? Blazy played with proportions in suits, combining slightly oversized blazers, with forward-shouldered pieces, with half-pant-half-skirts, and then more skirts over trousers.
Models carried multiple bags—a formal leather satchel and a tote (“the disposable became precious,” Blazy noted)—to recreate the ride home from a quick stop to run errands. A male model wore a formal but oversized suit and had a pink backpack slung over one shoulder; the father walked his daughter to school.
The color palette, which mixed bright oranges and primary reds and yellows with navy, gray, and burgundy, was inspired by the chaotic, busy world of Richard Scarry’s books. If you don’t have kids, these books often inspire anxiety in parents, as each page features dozens of drawings and accompanying stories of cute animals driving trucks or fire engines or flying planes, and it can be daunting to get through a page, let alone a whole book. How charming of Blazy to take it as inspiration, yet another reminder to rediscover joy. If we could force ourselves to look at things the way our children do, or even try to remember how we looked at them when we were younger and less self-conscious and certainly less blasé, how much more fun could we have?
More joy followed: the flannel shirt puffed up and structured, almost with the silhouette of a Bar jacket; trench coats over coats over dresses, all creased and crinkled because real life is messy; playful bunny ears on belt buckles or frog brooches to tie up vests; formal looks that glittered and seemed covered in confetti, real Maxes of Where the wild animals are.
Fashion is fun, after all. And it can be experienced most joyfully when we think about it.
You may also like