Bottega Veneta gave Louise Trotter’s second collection to eight photographers and let each of them keep their own version. The result is a book, not a campaign.
The project is called Zine 002. Eight photographers worked the same Winter 2026 collection across the same eight-day stretch, and the house printed all of it together. Chris Rhodes, Cristina Stohle, James Ari King, Kira Bunse, Nicole Maria Winkler, Piotr Niepsuj, Rosie Harriet Ellis and Sam Penn each came away with a different read. Nobody was asked to agree.
That is an unusual way to sell clothes. A campaign normally flattens a season into one controlling image. Trotter has done the opposite, trusting eight eyes to hold a single collection between them.
The room
Trotter showed Winter 2026 in Milan on 28 February, inside Palazzo San Fedele, the house’s new headquarters. The set read as an interior rather than a runway, softly lit, with red carpet underfoot and lacquered columns overhead. Max Lamb built the seating, an installation of 421 chairs that turned the audience into part of the furniture.
The clothes carried the same argument. Trotter called it a dialogue between brutalism and sensuality, which on the body meant hard lines softened into curves, daywear shapes redrawn with heavier volume, surfaces that invited a hand. She kept the construction visible and then undercut it.
Winter 2026 at Palazzo San Fedele, the collection Zine 002 records. Courtesy of Bottega Veneta
The idea
The collection thinks about how people dress for a city and for the people in it. Trotter pointed to the social rooms of Milan, the opera, the theatre, the piazza, the places where clothes are seen and judged. She also pointed closer, to a grandmother’s evening purse and a father’s worn shoe, objects that carry a person without announcing a label.
Zine 002 suits that thinking. A grandmother’s purse looks like one thing in a studio and another on a stair, and eight photographers catch both. The book moves between scale and detail, between the runway frame and the minute around it. One collection holds still while the cameras move.
Most houses want one picture everyone remembers. Bottega printed eight and let them argue.
The Splendid EditThe house
Trotter came from Lacoste and took the house from Matthieu Blazy, who left for Chanel. Her first collection was cautious. This one settles in. Handing the season to eight photographers is a confident move, the kind a designer makes once she trusts the clothes to survive being seen eight ways.
Kering has spent the year restating what it wants Bottega to be, an Italian leather house anchored to craft and to Milan. Zine 002 puts that in print. The collection stays fixed on the page while the book keeps changing its mind about it, which is closer to how a wardrobe actually works.