Inside Patti Smith’s intimate efficiency for Bottega Veneta in Milan, which paid tribute to architect Carlo Mollino

Yesterday night in Milan (1 March 2025), a part of the town’s trend week, Bottega Veneta hosted an intimate efficiency from punk-poet and musician Patti Smith. The occasion was curated by Smith as an intimate offshoot of her offered out international tour celebrating 50 years for the reason that launch of her breakthrough album, Horses.

Gathering attendees for a night of spirited music, poetry, and movie, the occasion occurred in Bottega Veneta’s new headquarters inside Palazzo San Fedele – a 5,000 sq m former theatre situated within the coronary heart of Milan. It was orchestrated in partnership with Soundwalk Collective, the ‘modern sonic arts platform’ of artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli, whose different closest collaborators embody the late Jean-Luc Godard, choreographer Sasha Waltz, and Nan Goldin. Titled ‘Correspondences’, it’s the newest in an extended line of collaborations between Smith and the collective, who first met by probability on a aircraft.

Bottega Veneta hosts ‘Correspondences’ by Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective

Written specifically for the event, Smith recited a poem in regards to the Italian architect Carlo Mollino, who led a outstanding double life. The enigmatic polymath – who died in 1973 – designed iconic public buildings just like the curvilinear Casa del Sole in Cervinia and the Teatro Regio in Turin, and was additionally a celebrated race automotive designer, pilot, and photographer. Solely found after his demise, Mollino secretly stored an house in Turin that he by no means lived in, utilizing it as a staged fantasy world the place he shot erotic Polaroids of the town’s intercourse staff. The staggering archive of over 1000 photographs was present in a shoebox in his house, later changing into the topic of exhibitions at Gagosian and Kunsthalle Vienna.

The house, which was designed between 1960 and 1968, was visited by Smith in preparation for the efficiency (Mollino’s unique mattress, which featured as a part of ‘Correspondences’, was a specific fascination for the artist). In the meantime butterflies – one of many many symbolic motifs within the house – have been recreated by Bottega Veneta artisans within the HQ’s entranceway.

Smith ended the night with a shifting a cappella rendition of ‘As a result of the Evening’ in dedication to her late husband – guitarist Fred ‘Sonic‘ Smith – on what would have been their forty fifth marriage ceremony anniversary. The topic of a lot of Smith’s finest music and poetry, she was launched to Fred by her bandmate Lenny Kay in 1976. He died in 1994 from coronary heart failure. ‘I had met the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit,’ Smith writes in her cult guide M Prepare. ‘It was an surprising encounter that slowly altered the course of my life. My craving for him permeated all the things – my poems, my songs, my coronary heart.’

An evening of connection and commemoration, the occasion noticed Bottega Veneta keep a presence at Milan Vogue Week forward of Louise Trotter’s keenly-anticipated debut present September. Introduced on the finish of 2024, Trotter’s appointment makes for a welcome shift within the luxurious sphere as a uncommon feminine artistic director of a serious home. Trotter arrives within the wake of Matthieu Blazy’s transfer to Chanel, marking the tip of a specific interval of artistic (and business) renaissance at Bottega Veneta caused by Daniel Lee in 2018, who Blazy designed underneath till taking over the mantle of artistic director in 2022.

Whereas it’s laborious to foretell precisely how Trotter will method the latticed leather-based codes of the Italian home, she comes armed with a realistic design language developed throughout her assured tenures at Joseph and Lacoste. All eyes might be on Milan in September to see her imaginative and prescient unfold.