Bottega Veneta’s woven mycelium accessories are a noteworthy sustainability pivot and also signal the natural next step in fifty years of intrecciato. Here’s why the technique makes all the difference.
The strip of leather is about as wide as a finger. It gets cut that way on purpose — narrow enough to weave through the slots of another strip, and another, and another, until the whole thing becomes something denser and more resilient than any single piece could be on its own. This is intrecciato, Bottega Veneta’s signature technique, and it has been done by hand, in the same workshops in the Veneto region of northeast Italy, since 1975. Half a century of that kind of repetition stops being a method and starts being a language.
Fifty years in, Bottega Veneta is asking what that language might say in a new material.
The answer, introduced on the brand’s website with no press campaign and no announcement, is mycelium — the thread-like root network of fungi that has been growing underground, binding soil and converting organic matter into structure, for longer than humans have been making anything at all. Mycelium has been circling fashion’s edges for a few years now: Stella McCartney explored it, Hermès experimented with it, Balenciaga sent a floor-length coat made from it down the runway in 2022. But Bottega’s approach is different from any of those, because Bottega has done something none of the others attempted. They wove it. The collection features wallets, card holders, and keychains.
The leather underground
Mycelium, once harvested and processed into flat sheets, has a leather-like quality — supple, with a surface that takes texture and dye — but it has also been notoriously difficult to work with. It can be inconsistent in thickness, less forgiving than hide, more fragile under stress. What the intrecciato technique does, by design, is address exactly that kind of structural vulnerability. Weaving distributes tension across the whole piece rather than concentrating it at any single point. It was the reason intrecciato worked for leather in the first place — the strips reinforce each other — and it is the reason it works for mycelium now. The technique, it turns out, was not built for leather specifically. It was built for the problem of making something soft hold its shape, and mycelium is simply the latest material to present that problem.
There is something clarifying about that realization. The story of Bottega Veneta has long been told as a story about leather — Italian leather, specifically, sourced from tanneries that the house has spent decades cultivating relationships with. That story is still true. But as the brand marked the 50th anniversary of intrecciato last year with a campaign called Craft Is Our Language, photographed by Jack Davison with a cast that included Julianne Moore, Zadie Smith, and Tyler, the Creator, the language metaphor started to do real work. Languages evolve. They absorb new vocabulary while keeping the grammar that makes them coherent. The intrecciato weave is the grammar. What gets woven from it is, and apparently always has been, a question worth revisiting.
Mycelium grows in as little as two weeks. Compared to the years it takes to raise an animal and process its hide, that speed is almost disorienting. The material requires significantly less water, generates a fraction of the carbon, and is fully biodegradable at the end of its life. Sustainability reporting around it tends toward the evangelical, which is understandable but also somewhat beside the point when it comes to understanding what makes Bottega’s version interesting. The material innovation is real, but the craft innovation is what gives it weight — the decision to not simply swap leather for fungi and call it progress, but to subject the new material to the same exacting, labor-intensive process that has defined the house for fifty years.
Weaving into it
This self-limiting behavior is characteristic. Bottega famously exited Instagram in 2021 — an era of maximum luxury social media activity — and the woven mycelium arrived with the same quietness the house tends to bring to things it considers worth doing. There is a studied confidence in that approach, an assumption that the work will make the argument for itself. It usually does.
The women who built their wardrobes around the Jodie, the Cassette, the padded intrecciato clutch that became inescapable around 2020 — they understood, intuitively, that Bottega’s appeal was never really about visibility. It was about recognizing something made with more care than it strictly needed to be. That is, in its way, also the mycelium story: a material that could have been a talking point, handled instead with the deliberateness of a house that has been thinking about how to put things together for half a century.
Mycelium has been underground, in the most literal sense, since before anything woven ever existed. Bottega Veneta took its time getting here, too. The result, characteristically, looks like it was always inevitable.
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