One evening in early December 2019, Daniel Lee, the carrot-topped, newish designer of the Italian luxury brand Bottega Veneta, went to the Fashion Awards in London to see how his brand had fared.
He wore a black Bottega tuxedo and a black Bottega turtleneck, and sat at a table with the Bottega chief executive, Bartolomeo Rongone, and the Bottega owner, François-Henri Pinault. Mr. Pinault is the chief executive of Kering, the French luxury group that includes Bottega as well as Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, among other brands.
Mr. Lee, who was 33 at the time (he turned 34 in January) had been at Bottega for only about a year and a half; he was the youngest and newest designer in the Kering stable. He had never been to a fashion awards ceremony, but he was nominated in four categories.
He was feeling pretty good, and also very nervous, because he does not like speaking in public. A few days before the event, the British Fashion Council, which runs the awards, had been in touch and suggested he prepare some notes, so he had a feeling he might win something.
Then Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the model who was presenting the brand of the year award, announced: “The winner is … Bottega Veneta.”
Mr. Lee was so excited he ran up to the stage and left his speech at the table. That turned out to be OK, though, because he had a second chance, when he won accessories designer of the year. He thanked his team, assumed he was done and thought he could relax.
But then came the British designer of the year award, women’s wear. Won by Daniel Lee. And then the designer of the year award. Won by Daniel Lee.
“He was so embarrassed,” Mr. Pinault remembered a few weeks later. “He asked me if I would go up and get it for him.” (Mr. Pinault declined.)
After all, no designer had ever won four awards in one night at the event. Not John Galliano or Alexander McQueen. Not Stella McCartney or Phoebe Philo or Christopher Bailey. Not any of the most famous, celebrated designers in the era of awards ceremonies.
Was Mr. Lee, with all of two main collections shown (the second one not even in stores yet), really that good? Or was British fashion, disheartened and in flux amid Brexit, simply so desperate for a fairy tale it was kissing a frog and declaring him a king?
Sometimes, being crowned the Next Big Thing is the worst thing that can happen to a designer. As Mr. Lee approaches the one-year mark after his first show, just as the annual results under his tenure roll in, he knows everyone will be wondering whether this is one of those times.
The Return of the It Bag
“I don’t want to be a designer of just hype, but of longevity, so I feel a lot of pressure this year,” Mr. Lee said in late January, sitting in his office in Milan, wearing a black crew-neck sweater (Bottega), dark jeans (Bottega) and sneakers (Nike).
Unlike his predecessor Tomas Maier, who was creative director from 2001 to 2018, but who was based in New York, Mr. Lee, who had been living in London, relocated to Milan after he got the Bottega job in June 2018. (He did keep his place in Britain.)
In person, Mr. Lee looks a lot like Ron Howard in his “Happy Days” days, only more tightly wound. He had made lots of notes for our interview because, he said, “I wanted to make sure I would say something useful.” They were printed out on sheets of white paper on his desk, all perfectly aligned in piles.
The hype was a reference to the awards, but also to the Pouch, a squishy clutch bag made from butter-soft leather crushed in the middle that feels kind of like a soft toy, or a therapy dog. It was among the first products Mr. Lee made when he arrived at Bottega, and it was a phenomenon: an It bag when It bags were no longer supposed to exist.
“It was the time when there was a lot of logos,” Mr. Pinault said. “Everyone was making a frame bag. Everyone said you needed to have a hand free to carry your phone and text or whatever. He absolutely went against the trend. He made this soft thing you had to carry instead of your phone. It was a brilliant idea.”
In short order, the Pouch seemed to be everywhere. Reports came that it was sold out in all Bottega stores. (To be fair, most of the brand’s own stores hadn’t ordered many because it was so different from what had come before that they weren’t sure anyone would buy it.) They are still, Mr. Rongone said, “selling hundreds of Pouches per week.”
Rihanna posted a video of herself on Instagram striding toward a pool while clutching her Pouch. Kylie Jenner and Phoebe Waller-Bridge were spotted with Pouches. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley put hers on Instagram 39 times in three months. (Paper magazine counted.) The influencers Arielle Charnas and Pernille Teisbaek posted multiple pictures of themselves with Pouches.
According to Kering’s 2019 annual report, released earlier this month, the Pouch was “the fastest selling bag in Bottega Veneta history.” It was followed not long afterward by aggressively square-toed leather slides with the trademark basket-weave intrecciato of the brand blown up to steroidal proportions, more bags, and quilted leather skirts and coats.
By September, seemingly all of British Vogue owned one or two Bottega pieces. At the Milan ready-to-wear show later that month, half of the front row was wearing the shoes or carrying a bag.
A Bottega spokesman said the brand did not give any products to influencers or celebrities and that this all happened because everyone loved the pieces so much, though he also admitted that the company did send some bags and shoes to editors as “thank yous” — and the company did “occasionally gift close friends of the house.” He also suggested that some e-tailers, like Net-a-Porter and matches.com, had deals with influencers to promote products on their sites and might have facilitated the acquisitions.
If that sounds a bit like having your cake and eating it too, it is.
However it happened, it worked.
According to data from Lyst, the global fashion search engine, the Pouch was the fifth “hottest” women’s product in the second quarter of 2019 and is still being searched, on average, 240 times a day. After the September show, searches for Bottega Veneta shoes spiked 156 percent.
This all helped Kering report Bottega revenues of 1.167 billion euros (approximately $1.3 billion) in 2019, a 2.2 percent increase from the year before — tiny compared to Gucci’s double digit figures, but after three years of not entirely positive numbers, widely taken as a sign of a turnaround in reports by Citibank, Deutsche Bank and other industry analysts. Especially because sales were up 9.4 percent in the fourth quarter. Overall, Mr. Rongone said, they were far above market projections.
Nothing to Lose
The irony of the Pouch is that Mr. Lee hadn’t even been hired as an accessory guy. In 2018, Mr. Pinault and Claus-Dietrich Lahrs, then the Bottega chief executive, had decided that if the brand were ever to move to the next level — and it already had revenues of €1.1 billion a year — Bottega had to become known not just for leather goods, which were responsible for approximately 80 percent of revenues, but also for its ready-to-wear. So after Mr. Maier left, they started looking for someone who was really good at clothes.
Mr. Lee, whose whole family, including two siblings, is still in Yorkshire, in northern England, where he was born, does not have the typical origin story of a fashion phenomenon. He didn’t grow up dressing Barbies or dreaming of cabarets.
He wanted to be a dancer, thanks to his grandmother (she is 87 and still goes to Pilates once a week), but then he discovered he had flat feet, and anyway, he was pretty academic. His parents — a mechanic and a secretary — had expected him “to do something like law or medicine.” He kind of stumbled into design after deciding he wanted to move to London.
“Where I’m from is very green, very beautiful, but not so much energy,” he said. He was drawn to the mix of creativity and discipline in fashion — he likes the idea of seasonal deadlines — as well as its collaborative nature.
At Central Saint Martins, where he did both his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree, he concentrated in knitwear and did internships with Giles Deacon, Margiela and Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière.
“He was very focused and committed and determined,” said Sarah Gresty, his tutor for two years of his B.A. (She is now the B.A. fashion course leader, and they are still close.) For his final-year fashion show, she said, he used money from an outside job to hire his own model, so his patterns would fit perfectly.
After graduation, Mr. Lee worked briefly at Donna Karan, before moving to Céline under Phoebe Philo, where he was hired as a member of the design team in 2013. By the time Mr. Pinault started hearing about him, he had been promoted to design director of all ready-to-wear collections, a leapfrogging to the semi-top that is a pretty clear reflection of the scale of his ambition.
Ms. Philo resigned just before Christmas 2017, and though it was suggested within Céline that Mr. Lee should replace her, he left in January. His plan, he said, was to take a year off and think, despite the fact almost every headhunter in fashion was calling. He made it as far as Japan. Then Mr. Pinault got in touch.
Not that the Kering chief wanted another Céline (that was wishful thinking in the fashion world, in mourning after Ms. Philo’s departure). But he was interested in the clarity of that vision.
Mr. Lee is “an Englishman, but he’s not eccentric,” Mr. Pinault said. “He’s more austere, minimal. He’s capable of thinking out of being British.”
The thing Mr. Lee had — the thing Mr. Pinault saw, and the thing that also precipitated the Pouch — was a willingness to follow his nose about what was important, even if it had nothing to do with what was happening elsewhere in the fashion world.
Mr. Pinault had seen the upside of that approach thanks to Alessandro Michele at Gucci, another unknown No. 2 who was named to the top of a brand, changed everything as he saw fit and has set the pace for fashion ever since.
Mr. Lee came in to meet with Mr. Pinault on a Friday. On Sunday Mr. Pinault offered him the job.
More to Prove
So far the Bottega accessories have made a much bigger splash than the ready-to-wear, which has had a mixed reception. To date, it has involved a lot of leather in outsize blouson proportions and knitwear in clingier, artier forms. The first collection made the neck an erogenous zone; the second, the lower back.
The clothes can be constructively tricky but are rarely decorative. Once you know what to look for, they are identifiable, but the signs are pretty insider at the moment. Still, BTS, the Korean boy band, wore Bottega men’s wear to the Grammys in January, so that could change. (The Bottega spokesman said their stylist bought the clothes.)
Mr. Lee has stayed mostly behind the scenes, though he will do rudimentary press scrums after his show, where he often repeats the same catchphrase over and over and looks as if he were passing kidney stones. It is such a painful experience that, after the first show, Bridget Foley wrote in WWD: “Really pal? You’re 33, this is your runway debut at a major house owned by a top-tier luxury group, and you’re too tired to parse out a one-liner about your clothes?”
Mr. Lee knows he is “playing catch-up” on that part of the job. “If I never had to have a public presence, I would feel much more comfortable,” he said. He does not have his own social media accounts. “I don’t now what I would put on there that would be interesting,” he added.
Mr. Pinault didn’t seem too worried. “He will gain confidence, and I think he will become more and more a strong ambassador for the brand,” he said. He believes Bottega will be “a pillar of the group,” though he wouldn’t put a time frame on that prediction.
Certainly, Mr. Lee has not been reluctant to make changes at Bottega. He took an empty space used to shoot e-commerce looks and made it his design studio, and he transformed the corporate gym into the atelier. Though he kept the whole design team in place after Mr. Maier’s departure, he has lately begun shaking it up.
His next focus is men’s wear, fragrance and furniture. Also a new flagship design. He is contemplating a sneaker. It won’t be a big sneaker, though. “I like a small trainer, that stays on your foot,” he said, staring at his Nikes.
He is also contemplating celebrities. In May, Bottega will have a table at the Met Gala for the first time. The label has to invite 10 people and is trying to figure out what that means for the brand. Artists? Architects? Playwrights?
First, Mr. Lee has to get through the next show. He has been spending a lot of time “considering movement,” he said. “We are trying to make every single thing with stretch. It’s going to be much longer and more fluid.”
He is still feeling nervous. “I feel very responsible for a huge amount of money and a large amount of people,” he said, and picked at the calluses on his palms from the gym. “I always had the ambition of getting to this point,” he said. “But now I have so much more to prove.”
When he said goodbye, he added: “Be nice to me.”
