Bottega Veneta gave its new handbag campaign a possessive name. Il Mio means what belongs to me. Louise Trotter built her first bag story for the house around five objects and the idea of keeping them.
Trotter took over Bottega Veneta in the summer of 2025 and showed her first collection that September. She arrived from Lacoste, and before that Joseph and Carven, a career spent on clothes rather than spectacle. The house she inherited was built on leather. Il Mio is the first campaign to put that inheritance at the centre.
Bottega Veneta started in Vicenza in 1966. Its signature is intrecciato, thin strips of leather woven by hand into a surface with no visible hardware and no logo. A single bag takes hours of weaving. Trotter has described the technique as a metaphor for the house, two strands making a stronger whole, and she keeps it at the front of the work.
Five bags
The campaign gathers five styles, and several are old shapes made small. The Mini Andiamo shrinks the Andiamo, the bag Matthieu Blazy revived with a knotted metal handle drawn from the 1970s archive. The Small Campana reduces a tote first shown for spring 2024. The Small Barbara Tote takes one of Trotter’s own early designs, a soft shopper, down to a size that sits in one hand.
Two carry names from elsewhere. The Small Lauren 1980 borrows from Lauren Bacall, whose character carried the style in the 1980 film American Gigolo. The Madison points to the first Bottega Veneta shop on Madison Avenue in New York, and rebuilds a flap front and chain in woven leather. The references stay quiet. The bags do not announce them.
The name
Drew Vickers shot the series as portraits. Each frame holds a person and a bag close, the way you hold something you own. Il mio translates as what belongs to me, and the campaign leans on that reading. The house calls the bags companions, collected and cherished and passed between generations.
That framing suits a leather house in a slow market. A bag built to last decades is an argument against the season. Trotter is selling permanence, the object that outlives the campaign that introduced it. The archive shapes make the case on their own.
Courtesy of Bottega Veneta — the ‘Il Mio’ campaign
A bag with a possessive name asks to be kept. Bottega Veneta has always sold the keeping.
The Splendid EditMilan
Trotter lives and works in Milan now, and she reads the city into the clothes. She has described her Bottega as brutalism and sensuality, the hard and the soft held in one place. Chu Wong, Selena Forrest and Sihana Shalaj carry that reading through the images.
Her runway seasons have moved carefully, keeping the warmth Blazy left while pulling the house toward something plainer. Il Mio does the same for the accessories. It reaches into the archive, takes what already sold, and shrinks it to a size the moment wants.
The bags reach stores through the summer. Whether they become the keepsakes the name promises is a question for the years, not the launch. For now Bottega Veneta has staked its accessories on the weave and the wanting, and left the logo off, as it always has.