Tomas Maier for Bottega Veneta articles

[DosViolines]

nytimes

You’ll Know How Much You Spent

By RUTH LA FERLA Published: March 27, 2008

TOMAS MAIER cultivates tenacity. If a tree in his garden doesn’t thrive, he simply uproots it and replants. If a supermarket tomato is not tangy enough for his taste, he is apt to grow his own. “People like myself cannot get happy,” Mr. Maier mused last week as he sat in the courtyard below one of his namesake stores in Palm Beach, Fla. “I’m always looking for something that is not there.”

During a fashion career spanning more than two decades, Mr. Maier channeled this pursuit of an elusive perfection into designs so low-key and finely tuned that they often flew beneath the radar. Then a half-dozen years ago, he trained his sights on Bottega Veneta, transforming that once-ailing fashion house into one of Europe’s top-selling luxury brands, with annual sales of more than $500 million worldwide.

Today the muted logo-free look that is the brand’s signature is widely regarded as the standard-bearer for a new kind of luxury: subtle, long-lasting and recession-proof. In such a climate, Mr. Maier himself has emerged as a hero, albeit a reluctant one — and, to his admirers, even something of a prophet.

“He’s not one of those in-one-season-out-another people,” said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, which carries Bottega Veneta dresses and accessories. “The fashion business has so much of that — so much marketing, so much hype — that there needs to be a spot where that doesn’t exist. He’s definitely the person who has created that spot.”

If he did, it was by cutting against the grain. While competitors were churning out look-alike handbags made of coated canvas, bearing hefty hardware and equally hefty price tags, Mr. Maier perfected his specialty: the Intrecciato series of hand-woven bags, some that take two days of labor to make (compared with about 80 minutes for a standard-issue designer bag). Signature products, devoid of initials, they typically sell for $1,200 to as much as $4,500.

While other designers were producing dart-free baby-doll dresses as if they were so many Fords, he concentrated on deceptively simple, painstakingly constructed styles priced from about $1,200 to $6,000 for an evening dress. The dressmaker touches — ruching, serpentine seaming, hand-beading and elaborate pleats — are recognizable to a small but informed clientele.

His maverick approach has reaped rewards. Bottega Veneta has become the second-highest earner at the Gucci Group, under its owner, PPR, which took control of the brand in 1999. Its clothing and accessories are distributed at upscale stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, as well as at more than 100 Bottega Veneta shops from Moscow to Mumbai.

The Cabat, a sort of woven leather shopping bag that is one of Mr. Maier’s earliest designs, remains in the line, evolving almost imperceptibly from season to season. Even with a stratospheric price tag of as much as $6,000, it continues to attract a following.

To be sure, that following was slow to build. Critics often overlooked Bottega Veneta, and shoppers turned to showier pieces. But Mr. Maier, 51, persisted, imposing his iconoclastic vision on the house.

From the outset, Mr. Maier drew a cult by catering to the type of woman who may buy only one new bag a year — if that. “She will ask herself, ‘Do I really need all this stuff that’s disposable?’ ” he said, adding ringingly, “The answer is no.”

That statement is heresy, he knows. “When I started to talk like this, people thought I was nuts.”

But fashion has caught up with Mr. Maier, whose subtle aesthetic and considered approach to design speak to a powerful niche.

Faced with a recession, affluent consumers “don’t want to be screaming luxury right now,” said Milton Pedraza, the chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a research group in New York. “They don’t want something flashy that everybody else has. They are looking for unique handcrafted things that can’t immediately be reinterpreted at every level of the marketplace.”

A 2007 consumer survey by the Luxury Institute lent substance to that observation. Respondents, Mr. Pedraza said, placed Bottega Veneta in the first tier of luxury brands, ranking with Hermès and Vera Wang among the top three in consumer recognition and approval.

Those consumers are shopping for “sustainable luxury,” said Ed Burstell, a senior vice president at Bergdorf Goodman. Instead of buying a $1,500 handbag that may be indistinguishable from versions selling for one tenth of the price, they may part with several thousand dollars for a piece that looks durable and worth the splurge. Yes, those shoppers represent a minute portion of the population, but their devotion has helped build the brand. The leather goods account for 82.3 percent of the company’s sales.

Those values are in keeping with the original aims of the house. In the mid-1960s, Bottega Veneta was among a handful of small leather-goods makers setting the standard for Italian craftsmanship. In the 1970s, its intricately woven rustic-looking designs were sufficiently identifiable to inspire the company’s slogan, “When your own initials are enough.”

But by 2001, when the Gucci Group bought the brand for roughly $200 million, its standards had eroded. The company was bankrupt, said Domenico De Sole, Gucci’s former chief, its 21 stores selling flashy but otherwise unmemorable leather goods. That year Tom Ford, then the creative director of the Gucci Group, hired Mr. Maier, who had designed for Hermès and Sonia Rykiel, to restore the luster of the brand.

“It was probably one of the worst moments in the economy,” Patrizio Di Marco, the president of Bottega Veneta, recalled. The post-9/11 recession “injured an industry that is usually resistant to economic downturns,” he said.

Despite the sagging market, Mr. Maier stuck to his ways. With the blessing of Mr. Ford and Mr. De Sole, he ignored a few cherished marketing precepts, refusing, for instance, to follow the widespread practice of turning out a successful bag in three sizes and adjusting the prices accordingly. “If the bag is right, one version is enough,” Mr. Maier insists to this day.

At other companies, where the creative director holds less sway, he might have been out in a season, Mr. De Sole said.

Conscientious almost to a fault, Mr. Maier will not make pieces that are strictly for show. “I never design for design’s sake,” he said. “You don’t put things on the runway and then not sell them at the store. Women hate that.”

Unlike high-end competitors, many of whom manufacture in China, the company under his direction continues to makes bags, clothing and jewelry in Italy. A furniture collection is also manufactured in Europe.

At times Mr. Maier encountered opposition. Andrew Preston, his companion of 20 years and a partner in the two Tomas Maier stores, acknowledged that the designer had to overcome a certain amount of skepticism. “He doesn’t believe in the quick fix and the gimmick product,” Mr. Preston said. “People in fashion found that a bit odd, because this is a disposable business, generally.”

Looking back on his career, Mr. Maier prides himself on taking the long view. “I’ve always been such an outsider,” said the designer, the son of a successful architect in Germany. Growing up in the small town of Pforzheim, in the Black Forest, he sat at his father’s drafting table and accompanied him to building sites, evolving an eye for line and form, and learning patience.

A degree of asceticism informs his work and even extends to the clothes he wears, monochromatic ensembles, many of his own design. A reluctant pinup, Mr. Maier cultivates a monkish look, his hair close-cropped, his chin stubbled, his lips compressed. And like a proper friar, he shuns the limelight.

You will not find him out partying with the Beckhams or recovering from his excesses at some boutique rehab. When he is not in Italy monitoring production, he is minding the Tomas Maier stores, the first in Miami Beach and the latest in Palm Beach, which opened in November. At other times he can be seen taking a spade to his flower beds, often as early as 6 a.m.

Sure, he allowed, fashion thrives on a star system, catapulting last season’s unknown into the celebrity stratosphere, “and then, who knows ...” He trailed off, then brightened. “I don’t think you need to be like that,” he said. “In any case, I don’t want it.”

Is his demurral self-protective? “People are very fickle,” Mr. Maier said. A canny glint in his eye, he added, “If you’re never in fashion, you are never out.”

Chago Akii-bua and Brian Jones
STEALTH WEALTH Tomas Maier appeals to a tiny but affluent market.

Chago Akii-bua and Brian Jones

Claudio Gallone/Getty Images, for The New York Times
A RELUCTANT HERO, MAYBE EVEN A PROPHET Tomas Maier, the creative director for Bottega Veneta at his office in Milan.

Part of an ad campaign, shot by Sam Taylor-Wood.

Chago Akii-bua and Brian Jones
A dress from the spring collection.

 

[aldn]

This is great. Karma to you. = )

 

[Spike413]

One of these days I have to make time to actually go into a BV store, instead of just windowshop.

It's such a detail oriented brand at this point, and in a way it's great that BV and Maier are finally getting recognition outside of the fashion elite.

Every time I see a fake Intrecciato, a fairy dies.

 

[fashionista-ta]

Great article!

PS Just a comment on the bag size issue ... I disagree with Tomas on this, and I actually carry purses I don't carry a Bottega bag, because for me they are either far too big, or far too small. I've told my SA that, but I don't know if feedback like that gets back or not ...

 

[Alejandro]

bottega veneta was so much different in the early 00s, it was so ghetto and trashy. i loved it

ss01 and aw01, style.com

 

[Foxie-Pooh]

I really appreciate what Maier has done for the brand. Most pieces are crafted with impeccable skills and sold with integrity. I like his vision and I really hope that PPR won't corrupt what Maier is trying to preserve...even though I have noticed the increasing commercialism associated with the brand...

 

[rangerrick14]

I love that he is finally getting the attention that he deserves. I am saving up for something Botteg Veneta. Simply because i will not feel as if I am wasting money for buying it.

 

[aldn]

They used leather for everything! Lol.

 

[Meg]

I was like who posted those trashy pics? I bet it was Ale....I scrolled up, and of course it was

I love his work at Bottega. The clothes are amazing and the bags clearly have an appeal since the tightly woven leather has been copied all over...of course Bottega didn't come up with this, but heavily influenced it imo. Love Maier's own line as well

 

[justlooking]

^haha

oh wow, i had no idea Bottega had such a diiiifferent image before?!

 

[chloehandbags]

bottega veneta was so much different in the early 00s, it was so ghetto and trashy. i loved it

Yes, I loved what Giles Deacon did for the brand, back then, too (I love Giles' work, in general, in fact!).

I have a BV bag from A/W '01 and it's so different from the typical and current BV fair (which I also like, but in a completely different way), that all the vintage BV and/or Tomas Maier fans I showed it to seemed to think it must be fake (it definitely isn't, as it was bought new from NAP in '01)!

 

[chloehandbags]

^haha

oh wow, i had no idea Bottega had such a diiiifferent image before?!

Yes, they were languishing (woven leather wasn't big in the late '80s and '90s), so Giles was brought in to modernise the brand (which he certainly did!).

Tomas Maier's very much brought BV back to its roots, though.

 

[chloehandbags]

PS Just a comment on the bag size issue ... I disagree with Tomas on this, and I actually carry purses I don't carry a Bottega bag, because for me they are either far too big, or far too small.

ITA.

I think Maier is totally wrong on that point, too.

I'm incredibly fussy and if the size isn't right, or the strap isn't long enough, or whatever, I'll pass (however much I like the design, visually).

 

[sweetpop]

Divine invention (title of article)

I thought to put this section about Tomas Maier here, couldn't find a thread devoted to the man himself, this comes close enough!

Source: Australia Harper's Bazaar May 2008
Photographed by Greg Kadel
Scanned by me

 

[lawlwut]

Wow, it's amazing how far Bottega had come. I didn't actually know much about the brand's history and I was totally like when I saw those pics from the earlier collections. I really love BV. I love its subtle elegance unlike those other brands which are just too over the top and very in your face.

 

[larien]

It is really suprising to see how he re-built the brand!I prefer this Bottega Veneta,of course

 

[fashionista-ta]

^ Uh, yeah

 

[Derin]

I started thinking that Tomas is one special guy. I have read somewhere that he was dealing with his own brand in Miami (and having some problems keeping it afloat) when Tom Ford called him over and finally convinced him to take over BV. He seems like a perfectionist and has the sense of quality which most designers do not have -or care about- these days.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Less is Maier by Matt Tyrnauer : Vanity Fair Article September 2008

Source | Vanity Fair
Stylist: Elizabeth Saltzman Walker
Photographer: Todd Eberle

1. Maier in the doorway of his Palm Beach house, overlooking the Atlantic.

2. The pool area of Tomas Maier’s house in Palm Beach has the discreet elegance of everything he designs for his two lines of luxury goods.

3. The dining room of Maier’s Palm Beach house, with a table designed by Maier, an 18th-century Austrian chandelier, Royal Nymphenburg figurines of Neptune and his chariot, and Saarinen for Knoll, Paris, chairs.

Less Is Maier
Bottega Veneta was hovering on the brink of bankruptcy when Tomas Maier took the helm as creative director. In six years he has pulled off a stunning $575 million turnaround at the venerable Italian luxury-goods firm, without sacrificing its no-logo, anti-bling aesthetic, his own eponymous label, or the Florida lifestyle he craved. In Milan and Palm Beach, the author discovers the interplay of passion and understatement, precision and freedom, that has made Maier a new kind of design star.

Before each of my appointments with Tomas Maier, the creative director for Bottega Veneta, I receive the same phone call from a member of his public-relations team: “Tomas is always very prompt, so please be on time.” These warnings take on the greatest urgency in Milan, where Maier works long hours at Bottega Veneta’s creative studios, overseeing the design of luxury lines including women’s wear, men’s wear, leather accessories, fashion accessories, and furniture—all together a $575 million business that has been compared to the second coming of Gucci, under Tom Ford. “Milan is not my favorite place,” Maier tells me, explaining his refusal to live in the Italian fashion capital. Instead, he visits the city approximately 10 times a year, living when he is there in a five-star hotel, designing and approving designs, and doing little else. The minute his work is done, Maier abandons his minimalist office at Bottega’s sleek headquarters, on the somewhat shabby Viale Piceno, and jets back to his home base, a pavilion-like house just south of Palm Beach, Florida, where he lives with two Chihuahuas and his partner of 20 years, Andrew Preston, the C.O.O. of Maier’s other successful fashion label, the eponymous Tomas Maier.

I am three minutes late for our 8:30 dinner at Da Giacomo, a smart restaurant in Milan’s Via Benvenuto Cellini. Sure enough, Maier is already at the table, fiddling with his BlackBerry. Wearing a trim-fitted blue blazer with a white, open-collar shirt, he greets me warmly, and I detect a twinkle in his wide-set eyes, which are shielded by thick, yellow-tinted aviator glasses. His German accent is pronounced, at least when he speaks English—his third language, after German and French. He was born Thomas Maier—the h was dropped to make his first and last names more symmetrical—in the town of Pforzheim, in the Black Forest, in 1957. His father was a successful architect. “I used to sit with him and watch him work at his drafting table,” says Maier, indicating that the elder Maier may have passed on his architect’s precision to his son—what Preston calls “a German mind-set that does not tolerate disorder.”

A few days after our dinner, during an interview at Maier’s office, I ask him if I can see his studio, in an adjacent room, where he perfects the refined tailoring that is his hallmark for everything from wool and georgette evening gowns to tweed women’s suits, to men’s cinch-waisted tuxedos—not to mention the fabled Bottega Veneta leather goods, which make up more than 80 percent of the company’s product line and can cost up to $75,000 apiece, when they are made of precious skins such as crocodile. (There is a six-month waiting period for some bags.)

Maier hesitates, so I imagine that the studio, like most ateliers, is in disarray, with hints of future collections visible in sketches and on mannequins. When Maier finally opens the door, however, I find the room empty, a sterile, white-on-white environment reminiscent of a microchip lab. He tells me that he has every fabric bolt and pincushion cleared away between fittings.

Maier’s orderly mind has found a very good fit at Bottega Veneta; so has his eye for quiet luxury, along with his strong attraction to all things anti-bling. A Bottega bag, unlike those from the main competitors, never features a logo on the outside. “Tomas is Mr. Discreet,” says Preston. “He is discreet, the product is discreet. The old Bottega motto from the 70s was ‘When Your Own Initials Are Enough.’ Perfect for Tomas. Streamlined, only for those who know. He’s not out to prove anything. Either you get it or you don’t. And he doesn’t want everyone to get it. I mean, it’s not like he’s trying to hide it, but it’s not his goal in life—to please everyone.”

“Tomas is the model for a new kind of design star—more understated,” says François-Henri Pinault, the chairman of PPR (Pinault-Printemps-Redoute), the $23 billion conglomerate whose Gucci Group includes Bottega Veneta as well as the labels Yves Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, and Balenciaga. Since 2006, Bottega has outperformed the iconic YSL brand and in the PPR stable is second only to the Gucci brand in profitability. Pinault adds, “Tomas does not put the attention on himself, but rather focuses on the brand, and the enormous attention to quality that defines what he is doing. I would not make a direct comparison to Hermès, because the Bottega customer is perhaps a bit younger, less staid, but Tomas is creating a new luxury house with a very wide product range—at the very high end—and finding success in a remarkably short period of time.”

In the seven years Maier has run Bottega, he has pulled off one of the great turnarounds in the annals of fashion. In 2001 the company was in the red. In 2007 it made $130 million in earnings. There are 113 stores worldwide.

When Maier arrived at the house, in 2001, after 10 years at Hermès designing ready-to-wear and leather products, the brand was in desperate straits. Many of Bottega’s products were made of nylon, and the 100 skilled artisans in the company’s workrooms were not being utilized to anywhere near their full potential. As of this year, there are 200 leatherworkers in the factory, and Bottega has started a craft school so that time-honored traditions may be passed on.

“By the 90s the company had been ransacked, totally gutted, and abused, but in the 70s it was a very chic thing for a woman to have a Bottega bag,” says Tom Ford, who served as creative director of the Gucci Group when the company acquired Bottega, for $156 million, in 2001. It was Ford who tapped Maier to revamp the brand. (In 2003, Ford, along with his business partner, Domenico De Sole, left the Gucci Group after sparring with François Pinault, François-Henri’s father, who was then C.E.O. of PPR.) “Traditionally, Bottega was understated when everything was LVs and GGs,” Ford continues. “I bought the company because, at the time, we had Gucci, and Bottega was meant to be the counterpoint to that. Quite honestly, it was what I would have liked to be able to do at Gucci at the time, but I couldn’t, because it was always this big logo brand—so this was an outlet, in a sense, to have a more sophisticated, quieter product.”

“There was this much left when I arrived,” Maier says, making a small space between his thumb and index finger. “They were going to be bankrupt in a few weeks, and they could not make the salaries for the workers. It would have been the end.” The company was founded in 1966, in Vicenza, Italy, in the Veneto region. The métier of Bottega was working soft glove leather by hand and weaving it into a distinctive crosshatched pattern, called intrecciato. Theintrecciato bag soon became an international status symbol, and Maier, in his revamp of the company, has made the pattern the leitmotif of the whole house, applying it to everything from his signature Cabat bag (an unconstructed tote, said to be the Kelly bag of Bottega) to silver picture frames, floor lamps, desks, china, and crystal tumblers. He has also pushed his leather workrooms in Vicenza to broaden the product line considerably. “What I learned at Hermès was passion and patience,” he says. “But, in a certain way, it’s easier to do this in Italy. It is the difference between the Italians and the French: the Italians are up for trying anything, whereas the French always tell you, ‘That is not the way it is done.’ And they don’t move from that position."

 

[MissMagAddict]

continued...

At first, Maier says, he was reluctant to accept Ford’s job offer. “I had just left Hermès,” he recalls, “just started my clothing line.” He and Preston were relocating permanently to Miami. “After Hermès, it was time for a big change. Paris was getting a bit grating after 20 years—working for Guy Laroche, Sonia Rykiel, Hermès—and we wanted more sunshine, more freedom. I told Tom, ‘That really doesn’t fit into my life right now.’ He said, ‘Think about it and call me back.’ I did, and I called back and told him I wanted to do it. It was going to be an enormous challenge, but I asked for—and got—autonomy. I could hold the reins, and no one would bother me or make me answer to them creatively. They kept the bargain. I could still live in Florida, and that was the only way I would work.”

Three years earlier, Maier had launched the Tomas Maier line, working out of an apartment he shared with Preston in the Palais Royal. “We started it in our living room, auto-financed,” Preston explains. “In the beginning, we lived between Paris and Miami a little bit. We would go back and forth, and then we decided to move to the new country and abandon the old. It started with bathing suits—very simple—though Tomas’s style wasn’t easy.

He had almost this creative arrogance about starting out: ‘We don’t advertise. We never discuss who wears it.’ I’m serious. Here we are starting this little company, and he’s telling me, ‘We won’t sell to those people,’ because they’re not right for the brand. And I’m like, ‘O.K.’ Thank God that there were people out there who got it, who understood that it was super-streamlined, simple clothing with no zippers, no buttons—the concept is clothes for time off.”

Even though Bottega has pulled Maier back into the center of European fashion, he has managed to create a dual existence. In Milan he leads a life of heavy regimentation and would-be anonymity. (For instance, he always requests a hotel room on a short corridor so that he does not have to run into too many people.) In South Florida, Maier shuttles between his store in Miami and his home and second store in Palm Beach—each one a jewel box, stocked with the things he loves.

"Personal details are luxury to me,” Maier says as we stand on the stoop of his Palm Beach store, hidden in a courtyard and up a flight of stairs in what was once the architect Addison Mizner’s workshop. “I like that it’s not on Worth Avenue, and you have to climb stairs and make an effort to get here. It makes it more special,” he adds. Maier’s stores are curatorial, with collections of his own designs alongside such favorites of his as jewelry by Tom Binns and Carlos Souza, Nymphenburg porcelain pieces, Santa Maria Novella products, Mariage Frères teas, and stacks of art books, including monographs of the work of the great Palm Beach architects—Mizner, John Volk, Maurice Fatio.

His interest in classic Palm Beach architecture borders on fetishistic. Occasionally, he and Preston can be found traipsing through old houses with a real-estate-agent friend. “You have to go right when the listing comes up, or else you will never see them again,” he tells me. “Either the new owner will not be someone who will let you in, or they will ruin it and it won’t exist anymore.” This passion becomes clear when he takes me on a tour of the town in his white Land Rover Series III safari vehicle. As we cruise along U.S. 1A, he points out Estée Lauder’s columned estate, now occupied by her son Ronald, and the former Mollie Wilmot house, renowned for the day Mrs. Wilmot awoke after a storm to find a Venezuelan supertanker parked by her pool. (She served the crew breakfast.) Of the vast Breakers hotel, he has a critique: “The color is really tragic. I think they should change it. So brown.” His current fixation is an Addison Mizner house once owned by a prominent Palm Beach family. Maier is obsessed with one particular detail. “It has only one very small window in the living room, the size of maybe a large door, overlooking the ocean,” he says. “Most people would think that was a flaw. But it made the room. A very restricted view. You could only see the ocean in exactly the way Mizner wanted you to see it. And that made it more special, because you were not drowned in ocean, but had it framed exquisitely for you.”

For his own home, Maier has tried similar architectural framing methods. In re-structuring the interior and exterior of the 60s-era, Bermuda-style house, he took inspiration from the California modernist Craig Ellwood, who, he says, “had the most elegant floor plans I have ever seen—all the loud rooms together and the quiet rooms away from them.” Like many Palm Beach houses, it is more than meets the eye from the outside. “I love mystery houses that look small from the street,” Maier tells me, “but you walk in them and discover room after room.” Behind a big gate there is a clean car court, which gives onto an ordered yard that looks like the fantasy lawn in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, with its trees in white planter boxes and a square fountain pool. Beyond that is a swimming-pool court that could have been inspired by the famous Slim Aarons photograph of Babe Paley by her pool at Round Hill, in Jamaica. “It’s really a house for being outdoors. I grew up outdoors, which is really why I wanted to leave Paris, to re-discover that.”

Maier may be a connoisseur of Palm Beach architecture, but he finds little pleasure in cultivating the owners of the houses he covets. “They aren’t the people I want to be with, so I don’t do that. But I would love one day to see the inside of the Everglades Club, just to know what Mizner did. I am sure it’s a beauty,” he says. There are only two ways to get into the Wasp enclave: apply for membership or ask to be taken by a member. Neither option holds any appeal for Mr. Discreet.