HIGH THEATER

Bottega Veneta, like many other fashion houses, is in a period of transition. As former creative director Matthieu Blazy departs for Chanel, the brand’s new creative director, Louise Trotter, who started in January, won’t make her highly anticipated runway début until September 2025. However, the brand still premiered something new at this Milan Fashion Week — along with its new headquarters in the former Manzoni Theater, renovated by Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen, they presented Correspondences, a performance by Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective featuring a tribute to Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (1905–73).

Before the show, I knew Carlo Mollino primarily for the polaroids of women that he took for over a decade starting around 1960. Ahead of the event in Mollino’s honor, I traveled to his hometown of Torino and visited Casa Mollino, the enigmatic apartment he created for himself but never occupied. I first learned of the home from an 032c cover story photographed by Juergen Teller featuring Kristen McMenamy sprawled across the floor — naked with her butthole visible — in a provocative homage to the sex workers Mollino collaborated with. Mollino’s photographs, which totaled around 1,200, were never intended to be exhibited and were only discovered posthumously in 1973 after he died of a heart attack at the age of 68.

When I arrived at the 19th-century Villa Avondo on the River Po, I was greeted by its current owner, Fulvio Ferrari, an Italian man in his eighties, dapperly dressed like a character out of a (permesso the reference) Luca Guadagnino film. Although formally trained as a chemist, Ferrari’s true life’s work has been to unearth the secrets of Mollino and preserve Casa Mollino as a museum. Ferrari gives me a tour of the apartment, noting its unique details, such as the severe bone-colored chair in the entryway, which Mollino designed with a curved back that mimics the human spine. I sit on it, and Ferrari asks if it’s comfortable. Despite its austere form, it’s unbelievably comfy, a stark contrast to the more rigid furniture by obsessives like Donald Judd. Lastly, we enter the home’s most eccentric room — the bedroom, which features a sculpture of the backside of a nude torso, leopard-print wallpaper, and hundreds of framed butterflies. Mysteriously missing from the bedroom is the bed.

After the tour, Ferrari and I sit on one of Mollino’s tufted black leather sofas, flipping through books featuring Mollino’s building designs, including the Teatro Regio, with Ferrari noting how aesthetically distinct each project was from the other. For Mollino, his projects and occupations were primarily about engineering and concept, which is why their aesthetics varied so widely — at times, they seemed as if they had been designed by entirely different architects. Unsatisfied with buildings, Mollino also built a race car and a plane, both of which he piloted. He’s like an heir apparent to Leonardo da Vinci, if da Vinci had realized tutto of his inventions rather than niente. Ferrari demurs that, like da Vinci, Mollino was also an occultist. Throughout Torino, Mollino had several considerably larger apartments, as well as the grand villa he inherited from his father in neighboring Rivoli. So, for what purpose did Mollino keep this secret apartment he so carefully curated?

Ferrari says Mollino’s home is modeled after the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of texts meant to guide the dead through the underworld and into the afterlife. For Ferrari, the house is like a pyramid, “which, for the Egyptians, was not a tomb but a home for perpetual life, in which the soul and the embalmed body live forever,” he says. “There’s a cushion embroidered with the Egyptian boat, a symbol of the human journey to its next life, because the soul continues its journey without the body.”

Back in Milan, Mollino can be felt in Bottega Veneta’s new headquarters, which, for the event, was done up in all black velvet and lowlights. One ceiling is covered in hundreds of brightly painted butterflies that look as if they fluttered to Milan from the walls of the Casa Mollino bedroom. The final room is a blue theater, a reference to the building’s historical origins, filled with one of the smallest audiences I’ve ever seen during a fashion week show, rivaling the most intimate haute couture presentations in Paris salons.

Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective emerge from the darkness on stage, with Smith dressed in a tuxedo jacket, ripped T-shirt, and trousers tucked into boots in the style Bottega Veneta has become known for over the last five years. Abstract moving images of Maria Callas playing Medea flash on the screen behind her as Smith recites, “I’m Medea. Do you remember my caresses? Do you remember caressing our little sons? Our little sons. The joy of our life. Our dead life.” Smith coldly drops each page she finishes reading to the floor. A clip of fashion’s favorite It-boy-né-man, Willem Dafoe, as filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini from Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini takes up the screen next. Smith strips out of her smart jacket and into a black leather one in Bottega’s signature intrecciato weave, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

The screen eventually goes dark, and a new spotlight appears on Patti as she begins an ode to Mollino, the “architect, photographer, adventurer, skier, pilot, and so many things,” as she describes him. She, too, visited Casa Mollino and was taken with the bed that has “magically, perhaps on the wings of a million butterflies, come to our stage.” (It’s the real one — missing from the bedroom.) Smith sits on it, reciting a poem she has written for this evening called Carlo’s Song. Her hand trembles as she holds her notebook. The poem ends with a sing-song phrase: “I dream of the butterflies.”

To finish, Smith says it would have been her 45th wedding anniversary with her late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and asks the audience to join her in singing “Because the Night.” During the song’s final bars, Smith chokes up, excusing herself — it’s as though her late husband’s spirit is lodged in her throat. Collecting herself, she belts out the final verse, and a tear runs down my face. It is always a shock to be moved by a fashion event. The only other time I can recall is Telfar’s Fall/Winter 2018 show — his first after his CFDA win — when Kelsey Lu, Kelela, Ian Isiah, and Telfar himself sang about gratitude for their community.

In this über-sensitive, post-Balenciaga scandal fashionverse, the fact that Bottega Veneta is able to so beautifully recognize a figure as complex as Carlo Mollino — an occultist who made fetishy designs — is one of the more intriguing narratives to emerge from fashion month thus far. And as the brand is not on social media playing to the cheap seats in the back, perchance they are one of the rare mega-brands that can still sincerely perform in culture.