The wardrobe. The term has rapidly gone into overuse, especially in the pre-seasons, where you can’t swing a buy-now-wear-now, lightweight shearling to ship in mid-July without hitting a designer who has been briefed on the merits of the so-called “wardrobe” as a talking point. Tomas Maier, too, was working the wardrobe — aka clothes — angle at Bottega Veneta. To his credit, Maier did something different this season: He showed Bottega Veneta’s pre-fall men’s collection to the press alongside the women’s lineup for the first time. Here, the wardrobe idea actually made sense, as the men’s wear was a lineup of cool, broken-in luxurious staples — leather jackets, needle-punched sweaters, Japanese denim — shown in rich, offbeat monochromatic colors, like teal, purple and green. Everything had a high-quality, washed and worn look that Maier prefers for men because “men have a hard time getting into new clothes.”
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He had a different point of view for women’s, which shared the same color story as the men’s but was worked on graphic, geometric print shirtdresses and rich, sturdy leather jackets that were intentionally stiff to tempt the wearer to break them in. Some of the patterned, bonded jackets were reversible, and the whole lineup, which came in an array of patterns and prints, from the clothes to the bags to the shoes, was done in a cohesive palette to ensure endless mixing-and-matching possibilities. Apparel-wise, the most appealing example of this were the multicolored tropical wool suits, sold as matchable separates. In terms of accessories, the bags featuring micro floral prints and a needle-punched spade pattern that matched the clothes were quite nifty. “There are two ways you can approach a bag,” Maier said. “One, is for somebody that’s looking for a precise function. The other, is to make the only reason to buy the bag is because it’s heartbreakingly beautiful.”