If Bottega Veneta is good at one thing, it’s weaving leather. Its intrecciato technique, now one of the industry’s most instantly readable patterns, didn’t start as a design idea. It started as a limitation. In the late ’60s and early ’70s in Veneto, Bottega Veneta’s workshops had a simple problem: the machines weren’t really up to the leather. So instead of upgrading the fantasy, they cut the napa into strips and wove it together until it behaved. No logos, no branding layers, just leather doing its job a bit too well. Fifty years later, a production limitation is still running a brand my half-blind mother can spot from a mile away.
Nearly two years earlier, which, given the past year’s designer musical chairs, already feels like a decade ago, Matthieu Blazy launched the brand’s first-ever fragrance collection, all while looking to its intrecciato story and its birthplace. Now Louise Trotter circles back to the same idea. Everything about Alta is bigger, including the distance from the original concept: more fragrances, more markets, lower price points, and a looser connection to its centre. Trotter’s ten intrecciato glass bottles force one Italian ingredient at a time to make friends with one coming from well outside the brand’s home country, “expressing a cross-cultural exchange through scent.”
Balliamo (Italian for let’s dance) is already a favorite, combining Italy’s sweetest white figs with a deeper American cedarwood and the fantasy of a garden-party setting that basically sells itself. What actually sits inside gardens is Montebello, both the brand’s leather atelier and its new perfume. In case you’re wondering what those trees might smell like, think of zesty blood oranges and pines. The bottled scent, however, is backed by Tunisia’s neroli, the essential oil from bitter orange blossoms. And where gardens aren’t involved, leather, unrefined salt, saffron, plum, and vanilla are.
