Matthieu Blazy, the 39-year-old helmsman of Bottega Veneta, grew up in central Paris and has a rich imagination. Although his father, Jacques, is an art expert and his mother, Christine Phillips, is a historian and researcher, he and his twin sister, Julie, and their brother, Quentin, often take him and his twin sister, Julie, and their brother, Quentin, on trips abroad – to China. , Mali and Burkina Faso — Blazy discovers more adventures in stories and comics. “I love comics,” he said in June in a café near his apartment in Milan. “Tom Sawyer was my childhood hero.” By his own account, he was an equally energetic boy, which partly explains how he ended up attending a Catholic boarding school in France and later England a military academy.
The tension between freedom and constraint also defined his career, which began in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2007 while working for Raf Simons. The pair met a year ago at the International Talent Support Awards in Trieste, Italy, where Simons, a judge on the competition, was introduced to Brazzi, one of the finalists. In 2012, Blazy was hired (albeit anonymously) as head designer at Maison Margiela Artisanal, where he was encouraged to express his creativity despite the brand’s reputation for favoring a collective image. “It feels very freeing,” he said. “Until the moment there is no more. With so much freedom, you stop challenging yourself.”
In 2014, he worked for a while at Celine, and with that came another period of restraint. “I told Phoebe [Philo, then the house’s creative director] I wanted to make clothes that could be worn,” he said. “For me, the idea of making a great pair of pants was enough. But two years later, he returned with Simmons, who brought Blazy to New York for a brief stint at Calvin Klein. “We were both fired,” Blazy recalled. “It felt like a movie: I Carrying my cardboard box down the street. ” Looking for some solace after experiencing the creative claustrophobia of working for a large company, he traveled to Los Angeles to help his friend, artist Sterling Ruby, who was creating a fashion line. After the conference, Blazy was invited to join Bottega Veneta’s design team in Milan.
