Quiet Luxury

As Tomas Maier, the man behind Bottega Veneta, leaves the Italian Maison, we look back at how the 61-year-old German-born design took his vision for a logo-less world into a maximalist market.

- Patrick Chew

“Wait, so I’m going to be on your cover?” Tomas Maier asks. “You sure you want to do that? Your sales might go down,” he laughs. His seemingly uninterested attitude toward being put in the spotlight, or garnering any kind of attention at all is something that has, in many ways, found its way into his work at Bottega Veneta, where he has been creative director since 2001.

That was the year Tom Ford phoned Maier to ask him to consider taking up the creative reins at the Italian brand. It was a question Maier didn’t need a lot of time to answer. “The opportunity to helm the creative direction of a big fashion brand doesn’t come up every day,” he says. “I was old enough to realise that.”

He was 44 then and, at the time, was establishing his eponymous label in the United States, designing out of his studio in Florida. Most expected him to skip a season and present his first collection for Bottega Veneta the following year but Maier hit the ground running and went in guns blazing. “It took me only a few months to put out my first collection when I took over,” he recalls. “It was crazy, but it was possible because I had a very strong idea of what I wanted.”

That idea was to get rid of logos. “I didn’t want to hang around. I remember saying, ‘Let’s get this going as soon as possible,’” Maiers says. “When I joined, the brand was completely full of logos. Everything had logos on it, or names on it. Those were were the first things I wanted gone.”

Maier had introduced a line of accessories free of logos for his first collection. “It was a bold move at the time. Everyone who came around to look at the time said they were unsellable.”