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

Yesterday evening in Milan (1 March 2025), part of the city’s fashion week, Bottega Veneta hosted an intimate performance from punk-poet and musician Patti Smith. The event was curated by Smith as an intimate offshoot of her sold out global tour celebrating 50 years since the release of her breakthrough album, Horses.

Gathering attendees for an evening of spirited music, poetry, and film, the event took place in Bottega Veneta’s new headquarters within Palazzo San Fedele – a 5,000 sq m former theatre located in the heart of Milan. It was orchestrated in partnership with Soundwalk Collective, the ‘contemporary sonic arts platform’ of artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli, whose other closest collaborators include the late Jean-Luc Godard, choreographer Sasha Waltz, and Nan Goldin. Titled ‘Correspondences’, it is the latest in a long line of collaborations between Smith and the collective, who first met by chance on a plane.

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

Written specially for the occasion, Smith recited a poem about the Italian architect Carlo Mollino, who led a remarkable double life. The enigmatic polymath – who died in 1973 – designed iconic public buildings like the curvilinear Casa del Sole in Cervinia and the Teatro Regio in Turin, and was also a celebrated race car designer, pilot, and photographer. Only discovered after his death, Mollino secretly kept an apartment in Turin that he never lived in, using it as a staged fantasy world where he shot erotic Polaroids of the city’s sex workers. The staggering archive of over 1000 images was found in a shoebox in his apartment, later becoming the subject of exhibitions at Gagosian and Kunsthalle Vienna.

The home, which was designed between 1960 and 1968, was visited by Smith in preparation for the performance (Mollino’s original bed, which featured as part of ‘Correspondences’, was a particular fascination for the artist). Meanwhile butterflies – one of the many symbolic motifs in the apartment – were recreated by Bottega Veneta artisans in the HQ’s entranceway.

Smith ended the evening with a moving a cappella rendition of ‘Because the Night’ in dedication to her late husband – guitarist Fred ‘Sonic‘ Smith – on what would have been their 45th wedding anniversary. The subject of much of Smith’s best music and poetry, she was introduced to Fred by her bandmate Lenny Kay in 1976. He died in 1994 from heart failure. ‘I had met the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit,’ Smith writes in her cult book M Train. ‘It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life. My yearning for him permeated everything – my poems, my songs, my heart.’

A night of connection and commemoration, the event saw Bottega Veneta maintain a presence at Milan Fashion Week ahead of Louise Trotter’s keenly-anticipated debut show September. Announced at the end of 2024, Trotter’s appointment makes for a welcome shift in the luxury sphere as a rare female creative director of a major house. Trotter arrives in the wake of Matthieu Blazy’s move to Chanel, marking the end of a particular period of creative (and commercial) renaissance at Bottega Veneta brought about by Daniel Lee in 2018, who Blazy designed under until taking up the mantle of creative director in 2022.

While it’s hard to predict exactly how Trotter will approach the latticed leather codes of the Italian house, she comes armed with a pragmatic design language developed during her confident tenures at Joseph and Lacoste. All eyes will be on Milan in September to see her vision unfold.

bottegaveneta.com