Louise Trotter's Third Bottega Veneta Collection Finishes What Her Second Started

Louise Trotter's third runway show for Bottega Veneta, staged in Milan on Saturday, September 26, kept moving in a direction her second collection had already set: away from the heavy, structural clothes that defined her September 2025 debut. The spring/summer 2027 collection pushed further into Venetian lace, crochet and color, without dropping the woven leather that made her first show recognizable.

Intrecciato, the woven-leather technique Bottega Veneta has built its identity on for decades, stayed in the collection but changed shape: elongated coats and flared trousers used it for texture and movement rather than bulk, and it carried over into men's trench coats and women's tall boots. Leather and raffia tote bags came back doubled in size from prior seasons, keeping the house's bag business in the mix alongside the runway statement.

The new part is the color and the fabric mix. Suits and dresses arrived in yellow, red, purple and florals, built to hold their structure without the extra weight, and Trotter reached for airy lace and crochet drawn from stitching and knitting techniques associated with the Venice region.

The set worked against the clothes rather than with them. Every seat faced a line of white cubes, each holding a single parrot tulip made entirely out of leather — the kind of handwork flourish that's run through all three of her shows so far. The boxes stacked around the room were dented and crushed on purpose, lit in the flat white of a science-fiction set; more than one review reached for the same comparison, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Backstage, Trotter described the season's work as finding techniques that kept the house's craftsmanship while making the clothes lighter and easier to wear — less a reset than a continuation of what her second collection had already begun.

The front row did its part too. Kylie Jenner closed the show in a voluminous black dress; Solange and Tyler, The Creator sat nearby, along with Bottega ambassadors Julianne Moore and Jacob Elordi. None of that changes what was on the runway, but it's the kind of turnout a house courts when it wants a show to travel past the trade press.

Trotter took over at Bottega Veneta in January 2025, named to the job the previous December after Matthieu Blazy left for a newly created Artistic Director of Fashion Activities role at Chanel. She arrived with a run of creative director jobs behind her — five years at Lacoste, then Carven starting in 2023 — and her September 2025 debut drew real notice for how deliberately it leaned on the house's leatherwork, and for how heavy the results were to actually wear. Her second collection, shown that following March, already started stripping weight out of the tailoring; this third one keeps going, far enough that the house's signature material now reads more like an accent than the whole point.