Because you couldn’t make it out in person, and weren’t allowed to anyway, Bottega Veneta has found a means to offer a runway show in a bag, complete with photobooks, and a soundtrack on green vinyl that puts together the SS21 show held in London in October 2019 for a very limited audience: Salon 01 London . A title that hopefully means it's just the beginning.

“Stillness and quiet can also be quite loud”, says musician Neneh Cherry on the green record labelled simply “Four” as part of Daniel Lee’s new season for Bottega Veneta, which took the form of three books and a record. The motto may very well have served as the inspiration for Lee’s clever and ground-breaking repackaging of Bottega Veneta’s winter/spring season. Without an audience and runway, Lee looked backwards to the ideas, images, music, and ethos that inspired his work as a designer, instead of fretting about the future that no one could easily predict, even if they wanted to, Lee turned the question around. “Where did all of this come from”, instead of “Where is this ship headed?”. The answer is of course as varied and colourful as the history of art, music, and fashion that fill the pages of the three books on offer, which include a close collaboration with the artist Rosemarie Trockel for book “Two”. With Cherry, Trockel, and images of PJ Harvey, much of it reads like a love letter to the 1990s, a time when media, art, and fashion seemed to move fluidly between one another without the stigma that comes with self-imposed boundaries, which appear to be opening up again.

left: Book 1, Photo Credit Studio 54 right: Book 1, Photo Credit Peter Lindbergh Foundation

left: Book 1, Photo Credit Studio 54 right: Book 1, Photo Credit Peter Lindbergh Foundation

Book 1

Book 1

The books are carefully curated, like any good runway show or exhibition, leaving the reader to flip between images like, or mind map, that inspired the Lee’s intimate show that premiered in London to a small audience on 9 October 2020 at Sadler Well’s theatre.

The background music for the show is provided by the Cherry record, thus giving each recipient the opportunity to relive, but also, reimagine, the new collection. Book “One” is mostly images culled from other sources that offered guidance and inspiration for Lee along the way. The most striking and productive results are collected in book “Two”, which was informed by Trockel, whose images and texts were created specifically for this purpose. To cap of the experience, book “Three” features shots by photographer and filmmaker Tyrone Lebon of the show in London, which means that one can put on the record and flip through, creating the experience of the collection without having to actually breach the velvet rope.

Isn’t this simple fact something that always separated the visit to an exhibition as opposed to a fashion show? You needn’t worry about the getting into the tent for an art show, and the pandemic has given Lee a new way to include the minds and bodies of those that may be otherwise unable to join in the fun IRL, exclusive or not. It’s also an incredibly courageous move, for without the flash bulbs and prominent guests in the first row, this season’s collection has to stand on its own. Each image collected in these books is something much more than a “look”, it is a distillation of an idea, something concrete and specific, full of potential and provocation. It is at once fashion’s origins and future.

Book 2, Rosemarie Trockel

Book 2, Rosemarie Trockel

Book 2, Rosemarie Trockel

Book 2, Rosemarie Trockel

The powerful images compiled by Lee and Trockel are a promise to future seasons and rich imagery, which may or may not be something that is displayed for a public, however exclusive. Clothing is like a second skin, Cherry muses on the record, and this idea of a covering and membrane between a body and the world is exactly the territory that much art sits inside of, or on top of. It is a surface, like the clothing Lee designs, and the record that spins at 33 1/3 RPM. This is the aesthetic, after all, and beauty is much more than a medium or individual design, it is the result of a wild and inventive vision that everyone can appreciate. Cherry says, “I like the idea of armor you can fly in”. The paths of imagination have not been grounded just because we can’t hang out under the normal runway tents in New York, or in the gallery. Looking backward is a powerful modus, one that makes the present and its future more grounded, and yet open, maybe even enjoyable. What is to come is surely not your mom’s Bottega Veneta, and not fashion as we once knew it. Let’s hope that art and its own guises follows suit.

BOTTEGA VENETA Salon 01 Campaign Artist Rosemarie Trockel, photographed by Tyrone Lebon

BOTTEGA VENETA Salon 01 Campaign Artist Rosemarie Trockel, photographed by Tyrone Lebon

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