Bottega Veneta ‘Jeans’ Are No Denim, But They Sure Do Look Like It

Bottega Veneta has had an ongoing partnership with the Biennale College Danza and the International Festival of Contemporary Dance. This year, for a performance titled When I Am Facing U by Shanghai-based choreographer Xie Xin, the fashion label set out to find a way to turn denim into something one can dance in freely.
 
Denim is not the most free-ranging type of material out there; you can’t exactly be doing splits and pirouettes without feeling some sort of tension or possibly even tearing your clothes. So what’s the solution? Simple, just don’t use denim.

Under the creative direction of Matthieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta has turned its eye toward the science of materials and texture. And with that, the label has taken to find other more mobile fabrics and camouflaging them into jeans. It previously had done this with its trompe l’oeil leather (which you can see below) where it cast denim print onto the material and turned them into pants, skirts, and the like.

Now, it’s done the same, but this time with viscose silk, allowing the dancers to drift across the stage without being weighed down. Viscose silk also departs from traditional silk and is made of wood pulp instead of silkworms.
 
The result is a crew of dancers decked out in traditional workwear, but instead of wearing clothes that can protect them from a hard day’s job, they now have outfits that they can twirl around in comfort.

This trend of materials moonlighting as denim seems to be rippling through the fashion industry as Balenciaga has done its own version, where it has turned cotton linen pants into what looks like well-worn jeans.

You can watch the jeans-slash-silk in action below.

 
 
 
[via Highsnobiety and The Guardian, images via Bottega Veneta]