BOTTEGA VENETA POSITIONS ITSELF AS A DESIGN PLAYER WITH SS23'S GAETANO PESCE-IMAGINED SET
Photo Matteo Canestraro
27 sep 2022, for frame
Location
Milan, Metropolitan City of Milan, Italy
Design
Brand
Production
The brand’s SS23 runway was a resin landscape capturing Italian postmodernism conceived by iconic designer Gaetano Pesce.
Key features
For the second show under creative director Matthieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta asked the Italian-born industrial designer, artist and architect Gaetano Pesce to develop a temporary site-specific artwork. The show’s 400 chairs were created by dipping cotton canvas into tinted resin, integrated with the resin ‘flood’ of the floor (which mirrored the industrial building back to the audience). The design installation was an ode to Italian postmodernism – loud, over-the top and colourful – as an essential time in Italy’s cultural production. Handwritten lettering on some of the chairs turned Pesce's resin environment into a Bottega Veneta brandscape, supporting the idea of the potential of architecture as a medium to create an identity for people, communities and places.
The Bottega Veneta Come stai? installation, in Pesce’s eyes, is a ‘tribute to the importane of diversity’. ‘As a designer I make originals, not standardized series –that’s the old way,’ he says. ‘This is the new way. And [Bottega Veneta] is a fashion company that did a fantastic job in helping me realize such a project. It is a message that is super political – and it is not a museum or a gallery that is helping me convey it. Who makes culture today? The museum or the fashion company? It is food for the brain – not for pay. If we see the same thing each day, then we die.’
Frame's take
Best known for his experiments with industrial materials like polyurethane foam, resin and plastics, the 82-year-old Pesce has spent his career fighting ‘international style’ and everything that might be called ‘modernism’ and is happy to see his work as political. Strategically, Bottega Veneta’s set and spatial design is about building a phenomenon of Italian culture. The brand will exhibit chairs from its fashion shows this winter at Design Miami (30 November – 4 December), where the chairs will be available for purchase. Earlier this year, Bottega Veneta acted as a cultural curator in the context of the 59th Venice Art Biennale – adding on to that move, the SS23 Milan Fashion Week runway shows an ambitious strategy to take the floor as an art-and-design dealer.