Bottega Veneta, carried by hand

Louise Trotter shot her second Bottega campaign in Venice, the city the house has never left. The clothes stay quiet. The bags do the talking.

Trotter arrived from Lacoste and took over from Matthieu Blazy, who left for Chanel. Her first collection was careful, a guest learning the rooms. Her second sells. The runway in February leaned into shearling and volume, and the pictures that followed put the accessories at eye level.

Venice

Chris Rhodes photographed the Winter 2026 campaign along the water. Malick Bodian, Leon Dame, Sihana Shalaj, Karmay Ngai and Aline Van Velzen carry the season’s leather through a Venice that reads as a working city rather than a postcard. The setting is not incidental. Bottega has argued its case on Italian craft from the start, and Kering wants that case made in the place the house comes from.

The pictures are plain and close. A bag hangs from a shoulder on a stone bridge. Another sits on a lap in a boat. Trotter trusts the object to hold the frame, and it does.

The bags

The Andiamo leads. The name means let’s go, and Trotter built it to move, a slouched shape with sliding straps that shift from shoulder to hand. In March she cut it down to the Mini Andiamo, small enough to wear across the body. The Barbara tote returns in the season’s greens and browns, and the archival Veneta comes back for the buyers who remember it.

Intrecciato runs through all of it. The weave shows up on clutches, on kiss-lock shoulder bags, on patent totes cinched with a metal clasp. Ostrich and croc sit beside it. Grassy green is the colour Trotter keeps returning to, a note of daylight against the browns and blacks the house usually trades in.

The logic is commercial and clear. A leather-goods house sells its silhouette through its handles, and Bottega’s numbers rest on the bag before the coat. Trotter has read that correctly. The Winter 2026 line gives a buyer a dozen ways in, from the small Mini Andiamo to the larger woven totes.

The house

Kering has spent the year restating what it wants from Bottega. Leather goods first, Venice as the anchor, a place among the top houses by brand equity. New boutiques have opened carrying the Winter 2026 collection alongside fine jewelry and the Alta fragrances. The expansion reads as confidence in Trotter’s second act.

The Andiamo, cut down and sent to work for Winter 2026. Courtesy of Bottega Veneta

Blazy made leather behave like paper. Trotter has turned that instinct toward the object itself. The bag is not a trick now. It is the point, and Bottega has decided who it is under her in leather.