Domain

Bottega Veneta is celebrating its 50th anniversary this fall—and designer Tomas Maier, his 15th at its helm. As Holly Brubach discovers, for Maier, understatement is not just a design philosophy but also a way of life.

- Brubach

“Everyone told him it would fail,” Andrew Preston, Tomas Maier’s partner in business and in life, says of the strategy Maier, 59, put into place at Bottega Veneta when he took over the Italian house in 2001 as creative director. Founded 50 years ago in Vicenza as a vehicle for artisanal leather techniques, Bottega Veneta had stood by the tagline from its ’70s ad campaign—“When your own initials are enough”—despite the fact that the culture had since changed dramatically. According to the gospel preached in business-school marketing departments and practiced by global fashion conglomerates, the brand—any brand— needed something that would enable consumers to identify it. If not a logo or initials, at least a symbol or an icon. Maier took a hard line. “No writing on a bag, on a wallet,” he says. “There’s nothing. Nowhere.”

Until you look inside. That’s where they put the name, as if it were confidential, for the benefit of the owner and nobody else. In a world overrun with blaring self-promotion, Bottega Veneta has offered a welcome alternative to the luxury brand as a club that declares your membership through its products—so welcome, in fact, that Maier is still there. The company has expanded into men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, a home collection, jewelry, and fragrance over the course of Maier’s 15-year tenure—an unusually long stretch in an indus try that has become a game of musical chairs.