For Milan Design Week last April, Bottega Veneta tasked design maestro Gaetano Pesce with creating a site-specific artwork at the house’s Via Montenapoleone store. Pesce and his team draped a huge scaffold structure with painted canvas, sprayed it with resin and backlit it to create an immersive grotto installation, where visitors could view two bags realised by Bottega Veneta for the designer.
As a celebration of this unique project, entitled ‘Vieni a Vedere’ (and among our favourite fashion moments of Milan Design Week 2023), each visitor to the grotto received a souvenir gift: a poster drawn by Pesce, commemorating the installation, and a box containing striking hand-painted chocolates by Turin-based artisanal chocolatier Peyrano – no doubt our sweetest Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024 winner (the distinct chocolates were awarded ’Best Goody Bag’ at this year’s awards, as featured in our February issue).
Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024, best goody bag: hand-painted chocolates, by Peyrano, for Gaetano Pesce and Bottega Veneta
Matthieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta’s creative director first collaborated with Pesce for the house’s S/S 2023 show, where he created 400 colourful resin chairs, as well as a poured resin floor. In the artist’s humanist style, each chair was entirely unique, featuring naive smiley faces, drawings of handbags, or the designer’s own signature.
‘As a designer, I make originals, not standardised series, that’s the old way – this is the new way,’ Pesce said at the time. ‘And this is a fashion company that did a fantastic job in helping me realise such a project. It is a message that is super political – and it is not a museum or a gallery that is helping me convey it. Who makes culture today? The museum or the fashion company? It is food for the brain – not for pay. If we see the same thing each day, then we die.’
A version of this article appears in the February 2024 issue of Wallpaper* – dedicated to the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024 – available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today
