Where else can you see the backside of a Matisse or a Renoir or a Goya as easily as the front? Where else would they be displayed in the same room as a Guerilla Girls poster? The effect, which is like standing in a forest of floating masterpieces, was revolutionary. She was a proponent of Brazil’s indigenous artworks when few collectors even classified them as such.Īt MASP, Bo Bardi famously created crystal easels to display works that encouraged a new way of seeing, interacting with, and showing art. Bo Bardi collected and displayed medieval and renaissance works alongside contemporary ones, pieces she made, and those brought over by famous artist friends and found on the streets or in marketplaces. She created spaces unlike many modernists of her age: full of light, referencing the wattle-and-daub shelters and wooden floors and thatched roofs of rubber tappers as easily as the creations of Gio Ponti and Le Corbusier. Part of The Square exhibition Eduardo Ortegaīo Bardi was an equal appreciator of the high and the low in a way that feels distinctly modern today and difficult to conceive of in the 1950s. “It’s not about a bag and not about fashion,” Blazy said. Specifically, the way the Italian-born, Brazilian-by-choice design icon had “brought people together, exploring new fields, never compromising on liberty, leaving the intellectual behind to let the emotional experience come first.” So when it came time to celebrate a decade of Bottega in Brazil for The Square São Paulo, Blazy proposed something aligned with both Bo Bardi’s principles and his own. Tomorrow he was going to align the world of his Bottega Veneta with that of the famed Brazilian modernist Lina Bo Bardi.Įarlier in the evening, Blazy addressed the crowd, recounting how, when he first took the reins as creative director at Bottega Veneta back in 2021, one of the members of his new team had asked: If Bottega Veneta was an architect, who would it be? “I answered immediately, ‘I wish it were Lina Bo Bardi,’” Blazy said. But the pleasure Blazy anticipated was atypical to those usually afforded the international fashion darling and certainly more abstract. The setting was a house party chic enough to defy that description but charming enough to earn it: Behind him, a dining table heaved with traditional decadent Brazilian fare around him, a crowd of local artists, collaborators, and friends clad in his designs spun and sang his praises and in front of him, the famed Brazilian singer Mart’nália crooned, backed by her band.

“I feel like a kid the night before a holiday,” he said. The night before Bottega Veneta debuted the latest iteration of its cultural-exchange series, The Square São Paulo, creative director Matthieu Blazy took a break from the dance floor to talk.

Wild jill barnett