LONDON — Ilaria Icardi has joined Bottega Veneta as ready-to-wear design director, WWD has learned.
She is working with Matthieu Blazy, the brand’s new creative director who showed his debut fall 2022 collection during Milan Fashion Week. She is in charge of pre-collections, and will be working exclusively on them.
Icardi has had a long, successful career working behind the scenes under some of the biggest names in the business. She was most recently working in Victoria Beckham‘s studio, and has also designed for Phoebe Philo at Celine and Stefano Pilati and Tom Ford at Yves Saint Laurent.
She is a fine jewelry designer, too, having recently launched an eponymous, high-end jewelry collection that features 18-karat gold, lapis, carnelian, colorful enameling and a sprinkling of diamonds.
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“Fashion has been my career for so long and I want to be able to do both,” Icardi said in an interview with WWD last year. She said she enjoys inhabiting what are two very different worlds.
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“The timeline is different: fashion is relatively fast, while jewelry takes time to change and to modify. With jewelry you have to be very careful because you can lose money instantly if you’ve made a bad decision — there is not much margin for error. But then you learn to recycle the gold and you find your way.”
She’s known for her masculine-feminine aesthetic, and her style in fashion — and jewelry is laid-back and cool.
“I use my creativity until the end,” said Icardi, adding that she likes placing her jewelry designs in an unexpected context, tweaking classics such as pearls, “and pushing the image to create something that’s desirable.”
As reported, Blazy’s first collection stood out for its quiet, but ultimately captivating, chic which was hinged on handsome tailoring and sumptuous, eye-catching accessories.
His clothes registered as conservative and timeless, with subtle but interesting design features, including a navy peacoat with boomerang sleeves and rounded back, or the cropped pants with the hems sloped forward to exalt the towering platform pumps and to convey Blazy’s idea of craft in motion.