The Weave, the Scent and the Fiat 500: Why Kering Sent a Perfumer to Bottega Veneta

In American Gigolo, 1980, Richard Gere lays his shirts, ties and jackets across a bed and matches them against one another. The clothes come from Giorgio Armani, who had the job because John Travolta’s manager knew him and Paul Schrader flew to Milan to see the collection. Travolta dropped out, Gere took the part, and the suits stayed and went to a tailor for his measurements. The scene runs two minutes and it made Armani’s name outside Italy.

Lauren Hutton plays Michelle Stratton in the same film, the wife of a senator, and she carries an oxblood clutch under her arm with a beige trench coat. That clutch has its own accident behind it. Michele Taddei and Renzo Zengiaro had founded Bottega Veneta in Vicenza in 1966, in a region whose sewing machines ran on thick material and balked at anything finer. So the two of them took the thinnest nappa they could get, the leather cut for gloves, and wove it crosswise by hand until it held a strength the flat leather gave up.

The Italians call that move l’arte di arrangiarsi, the art of making the constraint work for you. The weave they arrived at took hours per bag and identified the house on sight, and Bottega Veneta sold under one line: when your own initials are enough. Fourteen years later Hutton put it under her arm and the film made it a cult object overnight.

Bottega Veneta brought the bag back for its fiftieth anniversary in the spring of 2017, in the original Gigolo Red, under the name The Lauren 1980. Tomas Maier sent Hutton, then seventy-three, down the runway in a trench coat with the clutch she had carried in the film.

Two Italian houses in one American film, selling the same idea in the same year. Baldassare Castiglione named that idea in 1528, in Il libro del cortegiano: sprezzatura, the courtier’s art of hiding the work so the skill looks like something he was born with. Armani took the padding out of the shoulder and left the jacket soft. Bottega Veneta spends hours on a weave that looks like a pattern. Both arrive looking like an afterthought, and both carry the same thing across the Atlantic in 1980: Italianità, a way of living made wearable.

On the fifteenth of July 2026, Kering handed the house to a perfumer.

The brief sits in the third paragraph of the release. Romain Spitzer, it says, will focus on further enhancing the House’s desirability, deepening its connection with clients worldwide and driving retail excellence across markets.

LVMH states its own strategy in those words: continuously enhancing the desirability of its brands, drawing on the authenticity and quality of its products, excellence in retail. De Meo hired the doctrine along with the man.

Fragrance and Intrecciato: Two Senses, One Way of Building Identity

A perfume is seduction and expression by definition. It reaches the room through smell, it works through what remains once the wearer has left, and the house behind it builds every gram of wanting around a thing the eye passes over. Spitzer has run that problem since 1995, at Guerlain, at Parfums Christian Dior, at Givenchy, at Maison Francis Kurkdjian and Acqua di Parma.

Bottega Veneta has run the same problem since 1966 through touch. The strips of the Intrecciato carry the name fettucce, after the pasta, and the artisans at Montebello Vicentino work them on the diagonal by hand. A customer meets the house at arm’s length, in the moment of contact.

The current campaign goes by the name Craft Is Our Language. Jack Davison photographs it, and its subject is the hand. Gestures, fingers, the moment of contact. Bottega Veneta and Guerlain both put identity where the eye passes over it, and both make the customer recognise the house through a sense that works close up.

Luca de Meo and the Fiat 500: Italianità Made Drivable

In the summers of the 1970s the workers of Turin loaded their Fiat 500s to the roof and drove south, children in the back, returning to the regions they came from. The car carried the years in which Italy built its middle class and its confidence at once. Luca de Meo relaunched it in 2007, fifty years after the original, and what came back was the memory. A country recognised itself in it. The move made his name. He carried the same question through Fiat, SEAT and Renault, and brought it to Kering in September 2025 as the first chief executive from outside the Pinault family: how a brand recovers desire once it has slipped away.

The question fits Gucci, down 22 percent in 2025 and a further 14 percent in the first quarter of 2026. It fits Alexander McQueen, which shed roughly 60 percent of its revenue across the crisis years, expanded to as many as 135 stores, at times ran on sneakers, and whose UK losses lifted Kering’s effective tax rate to 36.1 percent. On the first of June de Meo sent Gianfranco D’Attis there, a retail turnaround manager, most recently brand CEO of Prada.

Bottega Veneta had answered the question in August 2025, one month before de Meo took over Kering.

The Figures on Both Sides: A Flat Division for a Growing House

Perfumes & Cosmetics at LVMH has held the same line for five consecutive quarters. The division stayed organically stable through the first half of 2025, through the first nine months, through the full year, and again through the first quarter of 2026, where revenue reached €2,038 million against €2,178 million a year earlier, a reported decline of 6 percent and organic growth of zero. Profit from recurring operations rose 8 percent across 2025 and lifted the operating margin to 8.9 percent, against a group margin of 22 percent. Watches & Jewelry grew 7 percent organically in the same quarter, Wines & Spirits 5 percent, Selective Retailing 4 percent, and Fashion & Leather Goods declined 2 percent. Spitzer’s division was the one that moved neither way.

Bottega Veneta has moved consistently in one direction. The house reached €405 million in the first quarter of 2025, up 4 percent, with retail up 7 percent against a high base and double-digit increases in Western Europe, North America and the Middle East. The first half brought €846 million at a margin of 15.0 percent. The third quarter brought €393 million with retail up 5 percent, carried by double-digit growth in North America. The year closed at €1.7 billion, up 3 percent on a comparable basis, with recurring operating income of €267 million and a margin of 15.6 percent.

Kering’s revenue declined 13 percent to €14.67 billion in the same year. The recurring operating margin fell from 14.5 to 11.1 percent, net income landed at €72 million against just over a billion the year before, Saint Laurent held at 20 percent, and the Other Houses fell 14 percent. Bottega Veneta grew through all of it, and the structural shift now reshaping the luxury market runs straight through those four lines.

Spitzer leaves a division at 8.9 percent that has stood at zero for five quarters and takes a house at 15.6 percent that has grown three quarters in a row. The man from the flat line gets the only one that moves.

The Campana: Bottega Veneta Builds Its Own Fiat 500

Bottega Veneta first showed the Campana in 2004. The house brought it back in August 2025, rebuilt in supple nappa, softer, moving with the body, in smooth leather and in Intrecciato. The Campana lifted the leather goods figures through the third quarter and the fourth, alongside the Veneta, and the fourth quarter of 2025 became the strongest in the history of the house.

Bottega Veneta had done it before, with The Lauren 1980 in 2017. The house reaches into its own archive, brings back the memory attached to the object, and the record follows. Bartolomeo Rongone ran the house at the time and left in January 2026. Desirability at Bottega Veneta lives in the knowledge of the weave, and that knowledge sets the house where it sits in the hierarchy that now organises the luxury market.

Solon Magrizos on Scale: The Threshold Sits Lower Than the Industry Believes

Solon Magrizos of the Birmingham Business Research Institute synthesised 109 studies on luxury and well-being for Psychology and Marketing in April 2026. Houses without logo recognition, he told The Silent Luxury, have to deliver on the encounter every time, because nobody outside their region recognises them at the level a logo does. He named the limit that follows: a conglomerate organises itself around quarterly performance, geographic expansion and standardised quality, so that a customer in Singapore receives what a customer in Milan receives. Standardisation meets the encounter head on, because the encounter is specific, located and partly unrepeatable. If you can scale it perfectly, Magrizos said, you have changed what it is. His hypothesis puts a threshold of scale above which that pathway closes, and he places it lower than the industry believes.

Bottega Veneta sits inside a group whose method rests on shared platforms and portfolio roles, and its value rests on the thing that resists a platform. Kering answers with hands: the Accademia Labor et Ingenium, which the house opened at Montebello Vicentino in October 2023, and the Accademia per le Eccellenze in Florence, which opens in September 2026 with up to two thousand training places a year in prospect. The answer shows in the number of trained hands, at Montebello as at the small houses holding their ground elsewhere.

What Spitzer Brings: Fragrance Already Runs Inside the House

Bottega Veneta launched its first fragrance collection in October 2024, produced by Kering Beauté, the division Kering established in January 2023. In June 2026, six weeks before the announcement, the house released Alta, ten eaux de parfum, and named one of them Montebello, after the town where the atelier stands. Its blood orange comes from the gardens there.

Spitzer starts on the first of September, and Reset ends in December. The figures arrive in February 2027, and the house has set the comparison at its own record. In 2017 Lauren Hutton walked the Bottega Veneta runway with the clutch she had carried thirty-seven years earlier, and the weave on it was the same weave the artisans at Montebello Vicentino work today.

The Campana Relaunch: How the Archive Delivered the Record Quarter

The bag that carried the record quarter came out of the archive. Bottega Veneta relaunched the Campana in August 2025, a silhouette first shown in 2004 and rebuilt in supple nappa with a softer, more fluid construction that moves with the body, available in smooth leather and in Intrecciato. Kering names it in its own quarterly material as the driver behind the leather goods momentum that lifted the third and fourth quarters. The Veneta line contributed to the same run.

The house grew by returning to its own weave. That fact sets the terms of Spitzer’s brief more precisely than the release does, because desirability at Bottega Veneta already exists, and it leaves the atelier at Montebello Vicentino at the rate of one Cabat per two artisans per two days. Time is the input, and time is the currency ReconKering keeps returning to.

Luca de Meo’s Brief: What Kering Is Actually Buying

De Meo’s method rests on a question he has carried through three decades in the car industry, at Fiat, at SEAT and at Renault: how to recover desirability once a brand has lost it. At Kering the question fits Gucci, and it fits McQueen. At Bottega Veneta it lands on a house that kept its pull the whole way through, which turns the brief into the other half of the problem.

Desirability that arrives through the hand reaches the people who come close enough to feel it. Fragrance solved that limitation decades ago, through clienteling, through the architecture of the counter, through a relationship with the customer built to hold across a product that stays invisible. Spitzer ran that machinery across Guerlain, Dior, Givenchy, Kurkdjian and Acqua di Parma, and Kering is buying the translation of it into leather.

The house he takes over already has a fragrance business, and it belongs to the same group. Bottega Veneta launched its first eponymous collection in October 2024, five scents developed under Matthieu Blazy and produced by Kering Beauté, the division the group started in January 2023, for which the launch was the first major product. The rollout ran through roughly a hundred stores and reached North Asia in April 2025.

Mezzanotte followed in October 2025 with three wood-led scents at €490 each, against €390 for the original hundred-millilitre eau de parfum. The house calls the line its olfactory Intrecciato, the bottles carry mouth-blown Murano glass and a Verde Saint Denis marble base, and the wooden cap cites the stilts under the Venetian palazzi. Blazy set the fragrances to work on skin, so they arrive through touch as much as through air. Spitzer therefore inherits a category he has run for thirty years, sitting inside the house he now leads.

The tension running through ReconKering runs through this appointment in a milder form. A method built on platforms and portfolio roles meets a material that keeps its own tempo. Bottega Veneta’s growth rests on two artisans standing at a wooden frame for two days, an arithmetic that holds firm against volume, and Kering answers it with hands: the Accademia at Montebello, and the Accademia per le Eccellenze in Florence, which opens in September 2026 with up to two thousand training places a year in prospect.

The measure of whether the answer works will be the number of people at the frames, and the same measure now decides which small houses hold their ground across the wider market.

Spitzer starts on the first of September, Reset closes in December, and the first reading of his tenure arrives with the full-year figures in February 2027. Between those dates the frames at Montebello Vicentino stay occupied, two people to a bag, two days to a weave, at the pace that produced the record he inherits.