Italian Fashion House Makes a Rare Fashion Week Appearance, Unveils Stealth Luxury: When It’s Not All About the Logo

NEW YORK — The Italian luxury fashion house Bottega Veneta rarely shows its collections outside its Milan environs. But with the opening of a gigantic new five-story flagship store in the heart of Manhattan’s posh shopping district on Madison Avenue, designer Tomas Maier decided to cross the pond for a big, one-time-only runway show highlighting Bottega Veneta’s women’s and men’s looks for fall.

Maier, an architecture buff, constructed a minimalist apartment-like set, with plush sofas, Gio Ponti chairs, patterned throw rugs, a working fireplace, and a John Chamberlain steel sculpture, on the floor of the American Stock Exchange to showcase the collection. Models strolled the concrete catwalk before lounging on settes in the midst of the bachelor pad surroundings.

Afterwards, such celebrities as Julianne Moore, Priyanka Chopra, and Salma Hayek and husband, French businessman François-Henri Pinault (the chairman and CEO of Kering, which owns Bottega), stayed around for a big party on the runway set.

Bottega is known for “stealth luxury;” it doesn’t feature easily identifiable logos like Gucci or Louis Vuitton, but instead depends on quality of workmanship and design to showcase the idea of carefree monied wealth. Maier opened the show with a model effortlessly wearing gold silk pajamas underneath a camel coat, with the idea of a woman “throwing a coat on top of pajamas and walking out to get a coffee or take the dog to the park,” he told Women’s Wear Daily.

Other looks for women include geometric-pattered dresses, velvet evening gowns and shaggy furs. The men’s offerings were more interesting and edgy, with tiger print pants, skinny suits in bright red or yellow, silky track pants, denim jackets in an acid-green color, and an overcoat in a color-block Mondrian-like pattern.

Sharp new accessories — a Bottega specialty — include loafers that look like they’re made from corduroy but are, in fact, corded suede, spiffy red ankle boots, limited-edition totes covered with the brand’s trademark interlaced intrecciato weave that are part of a 33-piece collection titled “Icons of New York” and inspired by the Big Apple skyline, and an oversized travel bag of soft nappa leather.

With Bottega stand-alone stores in Houston’s Galleria and Dallas’s Northpark Center, expect to see key pieces from the collection in Texas by late summer.