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Above: Daisy Edgar-Jones at the Bottega Veneta Fall-Winter 2026 show.
Upon walking into Bottega Veneta’s Fall-Winter 2026 show at the Palazzo San Fedele in Milan on February 28, Basic.Space founder Jesse Lee was floored by what he saw. Complimenting the show’s plush red carpeting and crimson lacquered columns were 421 custom chairs made by British designer Max Lamb. “He ran up to us and asked, ‘How did you keep this a secret?!” recalls Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Lamb’s art dealer and the founder of prestigious New York gallery Salon 94. Her reply: “Because he works so quickly!”
Expediency is a known part of Lamb’s practice. In 2020, he created 60 Chairs for Salon 94 Design, a marathon project where he took five 4” slabs of polystyrene and molded and shaped them into 60 seats in three days’ time. The process involved continuously cutting, gluing, assembling, and spraying until Lamb achieved his desired result. Notably, Lamb’s eco-minded approach means that no materials are left on the cutting room floor—every last scrap is utilized.
Courtesy of Bottega Veneta
The empty set for last week’s Bottega Veneta show in Milan, with its red carpet and white chairs by Max Lamb.
The collaboration with Bottega Veneta is a derivation of 60 Chairs, and came about when creative director Louise Trotter contacted Lamb out of the blue in January. Once Lamb accepted—navigating a pre-planned trip to India and the impending opening of his show at the SCAD Museum of Art—he had less than two months to complete the project. The designer remained undaunted. “He makes everything by hand,” says Greenberg Rohatyn. “The good news is that he knew, almost from muscle memory, what to do.”
For the Bottega Veneta show, Lamb followed the same rhythmic process, supported by a small but mighty studio, but instead of spraying multiple layers of resin the way he typically does, he refined it to two applications, a modification which both saved time and gave the finished pieces a raw and unpigmented quality—a stunning contrast to the venue’s scarlet-colored atrium, a former theatre that has since been converted into Bottega Veneta’s new Milan headquarters.
Courtesy of Bottega Veneta
A close up of the chairs.
The collaboration with Lamb marked the fourth consecutive season that Bottega Veneta partnered with a known design entity to create custom seats for its show. Previous incarnations have seen resin-dipped chairs courtesy of Gaetano Pesce, Zanotta’s animal beanbags, and candy-colored Murano stools in collaboration with 6:AM.
Though Lamb has partnered with fashion houses before (he designed the furniture for Acne Studios’ Madison Avenue flagship), he had never done a work to this scale. Elements, his current show at SCAD, features a broader mélange of materials, namely textile, wood, metal, stone and poly.
Courtesy of Bottega Veneta
So where will the 421 Chairs will live? A portion will go to Salon 94 Design, and Greenberg Rohatyn says there are also plans to show about 100 of them this summer in the gymnasium of the Campus, a midcentury school that has been transformed into an exhibition space in the Hudson Valley.
In her show notes, Trotter cited that she was inspired by the “expression of the collective: the wondrous collaboration between the heart, the mind, and the hand” as well as the Queen of La Scala, Maria Callas and her unconventional relationship with director Pier Paolo Pasolini. There was a certain operatic drama to it all: Trotter’s collection took months to establish and was revealed in a short span of roughly 13 minutes. The clothes, anything but flimsy: bold, sculptural coats and jackets in shades of black and gray evolved into bright full-length coats creatively engineered to look like fur. They were pieces that demanded an audience. And that well-heeled audience sat on Lamb’s hand-carved chairs that were made under an imposing deadline. Two artists at the top of their game making it look easy when we know it’s anything but.
“She took me out of my comfort zone,” Greenberg Rohatyn said of Trotter’s sartorial offerings. But not out of her seat.
Courtesy of Bottega Veneta
A look from Louise Trotter’s second collection for Bottega Veneta, which was shown in Milan on February 28th.
Sarah Cristobal is a writer, editor, and creative consultant. She is currently editor-at-large for 10 Magazine USA, among other freelance projects.