Matthieu Blazy

And yet he’s not had a speaking job in all of that time. Not, that is, until 15 November 2021, the day Kering announced that Blazy had been appointed as Bottega Veneta’s creative director. “It was surprising, and it was very stressful,” he says. “But somehow, I was calm.” Nobody in fashion needs to be reminded that the news broke just under a week after the abrupt exit of Daniel Lee, who had been Blazy’s boss. Starting with his appointment in 2018 and continuing throughout the height of the pandemic in Italy, Lee had presided over an explosive success. For the first time in its stealthwealthy history, Bottega Veneta had forged a demographic connection with young people, wielding an influence so vast that copies of its puffy accessories – the Cassette bag and Lido sandals – and of the Bottega “parakeet” green swiftly turned into a parallel fast-fashion pandemic of their own.

After all, both Alessandro Michele and Tom Ford before him were in-house unknowns who went on to revolutionise the fortunes of Gucci, the powerhouse in Kering’s roster of brands.

So this was Blazy’s moment to decide to step into the limelight. Heading a house had always been his eventual plan, he says, but not before he was good and ready and totally certain that he knew all the ropes, from design to merchandising and marketing. “I thought it was better to take a bit of time,” he understates. “It’s a good way to test ideas, and to test yourself. So what I can say is that when I took over the job at Bottega, somehow, I was armed. I knew my weapons.”

At 38, he calmly displayed his subtle approach to Bottega’s men’s and womenswear during his frantically anticipated debut show in Milan last February. Somehow, it smartly signalled both a fresh start and continuity. “Excitingly normal” was one incisive comment from a menswear expert in the audience. I put that to Blazy, wondering how he’d take it. He nods. “That was actually the idea behind it. I wanted things to look very simple. Not simple…” He paused to consider, “but fake-simple.”

It’s a blast of fresh air to hear him talk with unjaded enthusiasm about why he lavished so much work on perfecting a series of blue jeans, singlets and white pinstriped shirts. It’s the plainest, least complicated statement he could have opened his show with, but there’s a punch: they’re actually made of incredibly refined nubuck and printed leather. “That first look was really a question of how to take the message of a jeans and T-shirt – an everyday look – and to elevate it to the maximum. We spent three months printing, and printing, and fighting against this material: to really get the feeling that when you look at it, you can’t tell it’s leather. Not until you touch it,” Blazy laughs. “Which I find quite seductive, by the way. Slightly perverse.”

It sounds as if there was a bit of a behind-the-scenes battle to get this statement through – not that it was all of the collection, but still: “Boring! Some people told me it’s boring. I said, ‘Nòn! Look twice!’” When I remark that you literally can’t read any of it on the runway pictures, he exclaims, “But that’s fine as well! We’re very used to this system where everything has to be immediate; everything must be extremely literal. There’s this kind of excessive desire to want to reinvent things, and try the new, new, new. I think there’s some stuff that simply works, and it should be used as it is – but maybe the silhouette is different.”

Still, the huge responsibility was naturally not to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. When a brand becomes as ridiculously trendy as Bottega, it’s a multi-edged problem: how to preserve a luxury identity, and sales, while also steering the property towards something excitingly new? Blazy is clear-eyed about it. “I’m not someone who just throws everything off the table. For me, it was evident that Dan’s bestselling bags are part of the history of the company. So is the Cabat (the famous intreccio tote) that was done by Tomas Maier. It’s part of the company I work for. So you know, if some bags continue to sell, I’m very happy to have them in the store,” he smiles. “Which gives me the time to replace rather than erase.”

He has a theoretical brand-heritage inspiration to back up his instincts about the way things should evolve. In the beginning, Bottega Veneta, a luxury Italian leather house, never made any ready-to-wear. “When you see the imagery, it’s about the accessories – a man in a suit and a girl in jeans. Always styled with clothes which are not Bottega.” He cites Lauren Hutton in ‘American Gigolo’ in 1980, clutching a soft intreccio Bottega Veneta pouch under her arm – her anonymously cool wardrobe was by Basile, the Italian fashion house. Pared-backness, you might call it.

I’m beginning to feel increasingly refreshed by Blazy’s conversation as he starts to describe what a pair of trousers should be for a man – it’s an actual pair of trousers! “Fashion today is very focused on, you know, imagery. On being Instagram-friendly. But then, when you go to the stores, you have this feeling, like, “Where can I buy pants that I’m actually going to wear every day?” I look around me. I look at what my team wear, and what I see on the street in Italy,” he reasons. “You know, we can all do very bombastic fashion, but at the same time, I was interested in rooting the collection in something that looked more like style, rather than fashion pieces. I didn’t want to get into an exercise of making big statements.”

He thought of a man in profile, hurrying along the street, capturing his dynamic forward movement in the curve in the back of a peacoat and in the hem of his pants, with “a strange flare,” sliced slightly longer in front to double that effect. “The silhouette is layered. We kind of translated this idea of movement. But when you see the trouser, there the frame is quite classic: you have a waistband, you have belt loops, and there’s a pleat in the pants. So there are those ingredients which are very classic and they are studied in the fabric as well.” Then he laughs, “I mean, obviously, I don’t want to make boring clothes. They have to be balanced: they need to be exciting, but also perfect for everyday use.”

Another layer of his research has been studying how Italian men dress in movies. “They never look ‘too fashion.’ They look extremely stylish. It’s style over fashion. That was also something I wanted to work with: an idea of reality, but very, very alluring, pushed to an extreme in a way that the pieces look very sophisticated. If I see this silhouette in five years, I think it should still work. That was the exercise.”

But back to where Blazy comes from. When you look at how his tastes were formed, and the experiences he’s lived through, a complete picture emerges of a cultured man who’s also down to earth and psychologically trained by experience to deal with living through fashion’s volatile times. Put it this way: for 15 years, Blazy’s been working in the background at some of the most furnace-hot luxury brands in Paris, Milan and New York – and has seen first-hand how things that quickly flare can also just as quickly burn.

It wasn’t just being brought up in a cultured Parisian household with a well-dressed mother that set the child Matthieu on his path to fashion – it was also the coincidence of its location. “Our neighbour had a model agency. The trash was full of magazines. Rummaging around in there I’d find ‘Harper’s Bazaar’, ‘Vogue’, ‘The Face’,” he laughs. “I call it my trash education, literally.” This was the second half of the ’90s – that moment when grunge was transitioning into a whole new visual culture of minimalism and stealth-wealth fashion in New York. “We were digging in the trash and getting obsessed with Kate Moss. Obsessed with Calvin Klein!” Everyone in fashion knows that it’s one’s earliest experiences that lay down a reservoir of images and feelings that one can then drawn on for a lifetime. It’s not hard to see why Blazy is so much part of the rising generation that’s now celebrating the values and shared references of the ’90s.

He chose to study at La Cambre in Brussels; not the Antwerp Academy, Central Saint Martins, or any of the French schools which focused solely on fashion education. That was the first of his life decisions that, looking back, helped determine his destiny: the structure of La Cambre’s five-year liberal arts course was the ideal deep prep for the complex role of a modern creative director – a job which now demands fluency in the intellectual and visual communication of fashion through everything from photography to interiors to knowing who to collaborate within the arts. “You had history of art, history of music, scenography. You’d sketch, do painting classes,” he says. “Then in the afternoons, you could do stitching and atelier workshops. So there was something slightly more generous on offer. And I also love Brussels.”

He’s bringing that holistic mentality to what he’s doing today. “I love the idea of bringing Bottega together, almost into a complete landscape. Who are the customers in an ideal world – the people on the runway, where do they live? Is their house designed by Carlo Scarpa? Do they buy glass from Venini? What kind of movies do they watch? So obviously I look a lot at Italian design in general. But then I also love pop culture,” he smiles. “There’s this cartoon, Calimero, which is Italian and Japanese. There’s this little bird with a huge egg on his head. The way he carries his bag inspired the bag of the opening night.”

Enter the incredibly luxurious, tactile Kalimero bag – a chunkily woven bucket in juicy leather strands that honours all the craft of the famed Bottega Veneta intrecciato technique, but updates it for the generation that loves to carry around an accessory which is also a kind of pet. “I always liked when a bag has something almost cartoony, almost like an object in itself – a creature! It needs to have a certain personality,” he laughs. “The beauty of those bags is that they cannot be reproduced twice. So you make one, and then you will have a small mistake, which is not a mistake. It’s done by hand. It’s timeless.”

That was also where Blazy met the love of his life, Pieter Mulier, who was Simons’s right-hand man. Their lives and careers have been entwined ever since, through all the ups and downs of the Belgian fraternity’s adventures in high fashion that took off from that point. Change, creative idealism, high-stakes risk-taking and the collective mutual support of that tight circle of friends all turned into a normal way of life for him.

While Mulier went to Jil Sander with Raf in Milan, and then on to Christian Dior in Paris in 2012, Blazy, then aged 27, landed his first big job at Margiela, as creative director of the brand’s Artisanal collection. When I ask him about that appointment, he sighs. “A few of the people that carry the temple of Margiela were basically telling me it was going to be a dead end for me. And I thought it was actually the opposite, because Martin was no longer there. I thought I could maybe find my way of interpreting his legacy, but also somehow take distance, and to do my Margiela.”

Within a couple of seasons, Blazy was doing a conspicuously fantastic job – palpably the best since Martin had left the building. His inspired, wildly bejewelled head coverings – a reinterpretation of Margiela’s identity-masking devices – were seen by Kanye West and later adapted along with a custom wardrobe for his 2013–14 Yeezus tour. Then came Blazy’s first experience of the unpredictable dramas that beset the workings of a fashion machine. His identity as the in-house designer was always meant to stay “silent” (that being the house policy – a fact he also liked). Then, Suzy Menkes suddenly went rogue and named him in an Instagram photo she took of Blazy and Raf Simons backstage.

“Trust me. It was a very, very strange moment. What anonymity gave me was a certain comfort. And then suddenly, I was outed. My Instagram account exploded. I stopped it. I had a lot of issues with the company.” He’s forgiven Menkes now. “I kind of cherish that page in my book,” he laughs. But being publicly recognised as a rising behind-the-scenes supertalent had an immediate impact. Now, he was headhunted by the next major figure in the firmament of fashion: Phoebe Philo at Céline. He worked on the Céline pre-collections – the part of the business that had women flocking to stores to accumulate the perfectly cut pants, super-long-sleeved oversized men’s shirts and Crombie coats that underpinned the cult of the label. “For me, the pre-collection was the bridge I needed. I really, really, really had a lot of pleasure there, whether it was observing Phoebe, or working with the head of the atelier. This guy was extraordinary. It was almost a school, again. When I talk about excellence, about how to make proper clothes, this is what I mean.”

It was at Céline that he first worked alongside Daniel Lee – which explains why he later joined him at Bottega Veneta. But in between, in a next dramatic chapter, he went to New York and Calin Klein with Raf Simons and Mulier in 2016. It was during those thrilling two years that Simons reinvented the collection as Calin Klein 205W39NYC and staged some of the most spectacular scenario shows that New York Fashion Week had ever witnessed. It all came to a shocking end in 2018, when the corporate owners suddenly pulled the plug. The disillusionment of that moment rocked the fashion industry. “I had a little break,” Blazy relates. “I went to work with Sterling Ruby on his collection in LA. It was therapeutic, after Calin. Because I’d really thought I wanted to stop working in fashion after such an abrupt ending.”

On the way to and from work in Milan, Blazy also carves out normal time for himself. “There’s nothing more liberating than going to a bar or sitting somewhere to be on your own and decompress after work. Sometimes, you open a book, sometimes you just kind of dream, sometimes you flick through Instagram. But I’m alone with my beer. And it’s heaven.”

I’ll bet he’s also enjoying observing real life while he’s doing this, too. The words “real life” were repeated over and over as a mantra voiceover on the soundtrack of his debut show. It’s not, I think, that Blazy’s turning away from the excitement of the unexpected thrill in fashion. Not at all. In the studio, he likes to run a happy ship, where there’s always room for surprises. “When I do a meeting, I have five, six people in the room. Whether it’s the intern, or people from the product team, everyone has a word to say, not just the designers. Sometimes, the people from the atelier have a brilliant idea. That way of working for me is the only way I have fun – when I don’t know what is going happen. It’s like collectivism.”

Blazy’s idea about how he’ll navigate Bottega into the future seems to be rooted in his subtly radical instinct for not following the runaway bandwagons of fashion trends. What seems avant-garde to him now? Showing Bottega in Milan, during fashion week! (Prior to his debut, the label’s last three shows had been held off-schedule in London, Berlin and Detroit.) He wants Bottega to be identified as an Italian house again, showing “in conversation” with the other landmark Milanese houses. “You know, the idea of newness, novelty – doing stuff off calendar: I don’t find it modern. I think you can actually be very modern within a framework.”

It’s early to say, but I’m excited to watch where this will go. As we say goodbye, thinking about the promise of Blazy’s words is making me smile: “It’s not that I want to collage on a blazer, or to make a pant look weird. You know, I like the idea of a well-made trouser in an amazing fabric. It’s enough. If the attention to detail is there, if there’s excellent thought behind it and it doesn’t scream laziness or boredom – I think, you know, the goal is achieved.”