Did Louise Trotter allow the silhouettes to distend too far for Bottega Veneta to prove she has range?

Do we still need a hulk of a coat? If you have not caught up by now, you are unlikely to. Or be enamoured with Louise Trotter’s deliberately anti-Ozempic silhouettes. With all the padding, plumping, and puffing, Ms Trotter was essentially rejecting the fantasy of perpetual slimness. So you need rounded, bulked-up shoulders that Donald Trump would adore and Mrs Trump would abhor. It’s hard to say if this was a sly critique of our prevalent body‑image culture or simply a cautious retreat into oversized comfort, first introduced by Demna Gvasalia some ten years ago. The irony is that Bottega Veneta’s heritage is about a certain pared-down sleekness—woven leather that supply molds to the hand, clothes that sensuously skim the body. The Bottega Veneta autumn/winter 2026 inverted that, making garments into soft flossy shells. In the shadow of global crisis, specifically war, and Milan’s theatrics, those shells risked looking less like radical statements and more like puffed‑up protection. But against what?

Against the cold, perhaps? Or, merely the threat of being overlooked in a street protest on the Via Montenapoleone against the savage war? But there is a fine line between a fortezza (fortress) and a costume. By the tenth look, the outer-as-armour began to feel less like tactical defense and more like a desperate cry for attention. Ms Trotter opened the show with a black, ankle-length coat, bearing shoulders so bulky, it turned the model’s posture into a permanent apology. Much of what came after were more familiar pieces of outerwear, including the men’s, but bulked up so that they looked more like insulation project at design schools. The silhouettes were deliberately inflated: puffed coats, rounded shoulders, clunky (not chunky) knitwear, and sculptural leather that seemed to swell outward. Even a dress, admittedly with a beautiful draped skirt, was coalesced to give the heft of a collapsed sail.

If the shapes were, by now, more jelak than wool boiled in condensed milk or eating too much cotton candy, the textures were where the distaste truly set in. For all the talk of industrial grit, specifically “Brutalism and sensuality”, as Ms Trotter helpfully described it, the finish was bedroom rugs come alive. We know we are going to get flack for not appreciating the “craft” and the “technique” behind the guiding tension, but the language of Brutalism promised a confrontation with raw materiality. Ms Trotter’s garments delivered a kind of domestic surrealism—clothes that looked like they’d fallen out of the cleaning cupboard, not risen from the street as unforgiving concrete. One pink coat-dress successfully showed how candyfloss-strong is really ridiculous pretending to be a garment. As the fabrics grew fuzzier, we weren’t sure we spotted the gravitas, currently missing in the Milan season.

For sure, she is making tech-craft her signature, but was she really expressing skill or simply showing off? Regular readers would know that we are huge fans of Louise Trotter, all the way back to her Joseph days. And we were impressed with her debut collection for Bottega Veneta. However, did the overall rave then somehow pressure her to overdo it this time. This is not calling out the sophomore curse. To be sure, she offered some nice pieces, but some of the styling bordered on the questionable, such as Liu Wen in an oversized jacket and leggings, and spiked Mary-Janes. But it was the bigness—and many rounded as a warhead—that bore the bulk that clearly lost the war. In her first collection, she gave us room to breathe with crisp cottons and lean leathers. Planes of clarity. This time, the collection felt like, to her, a flat surface was a haunting. Every look had to be shaggy, woven, or fluffed. When a statement texture is the aim, nothing is. It’s all flavour and no substance to balance the palate. Instead of Brutalist grit, the show delivered a kind of carpet carnival—all surface, scant substance.