With ‘Craft is our Language’, Bottega Veneta assembles masters of their respective crafts to translate the universal language of the human hand.
Hands interweave like leather. A solid handhold with a loved one and good, sturdy leather products offer reassurance, durability, and connection. With their enchanting and deeply human 2025 campaign, Bottega Veneta explores these cohesive elements, woven tenderly with the same strength and reliability as their famed Intrecciato leather weave. Lensed by Jack Davison and choreographed by Lenio Kaklea for the fiftieth anniversary of the house’s famed design, ‘Craft is our Language’ reminds us that “[in] the weaving together of leather strips, the house’s signature craft is a symbol of interconnectedness, exchange, and the collaborative ethos […]” Blending imagery of masters of their crafts—actors, musicians, artists, and athletes among others—with the poetic dance of human hands, the campaign “[…] captures hand gestures that represent Intrecciato alongside universal hand gestures that connect people across generations, cultures, backgrounds, and contexts.”
Hands act as a mode of communication beyond simple language. They are equal parts body language and tools: They can convey love as deftly as they can anger; they can embrace and punch; they can hold an instrument or a paintbrush; they can provide pleasure or pain. For the Deaf community, hands are an integral communicative apparatus for conveying inner thoughts and feelings beyond the confines of the spoken word. As a human appendage, they are deeply universal; Bottega Veneta recognizes this. Like the hand, the Intrecciato weave blurs the line between art and artisan, technical skill and aesthetic sensibility, “[…] a defining expression of Bottega Veneta’s founding principles of craft and creativity.”
‘Craft is our Language’ utilizes traditional editorial stills and short films, notable faces, and anonymous hands to channel the campaign’s message of duality and alignment; “[it] stages a dialogue between maker and wearer, artist and artisan, hand and mind.” In one pairing, rapper Tyler Okonma, better known as Tyler the Creator, dons a fur-lined cap and leather jacket featuring the instantly recognizable Intrecciato weave. Holding a pair of sunglasses with a whimsical, awestruck expression on his face, Okonma—a recognizable if not idiosyncratic figure in mainstream music since the early 2010s—is placed next to the open palm of a hand. It feels like a blending of distinct personal identity and the faceless ubiquity of a hand. It is altogether individual, intricate, and relatable.
In one of the films, actress, model, and one of the original atelier muses, Lauren Hutton, speaks in unison with a Bottega artisan. Hutton muses on the universality of hand gestures in English while the artisan describes the design of the Intrecciato weave in Italian. On-screen, Hutton performs a series of interpretative hand gestures with another model; one passes a woven handbag to the other, symbolizing this unity and collaboration. Hutton and Bottega—specifically Intrecciato—have a longstanding relationship. She helped catapult the brand and the design to the public consciousness when she carried one of their bags in the seminal 1980 film American Gigolo opposite Richard Gere. Set against the effervescent tinkling of piano notes, it is a marriage of languages, meditative thought and technical speak, body and mind, muse and artist.
All imagery courtesy of Bottega Veneta.
