5 Terms To Expand Your Fashion Expertise

In 1989, Martin Margiela had to furnish his first home in Paris on a very limited budget. His solution proved more conceptual than practical: he bought second-hand furniture from the Salvation Army and covered it in thick white paint. The visible brushstrokes became part of the aesthetic he was looking for, giving rise to the bianchetto, an Italian word meaning "whitewash."

That same year, Margiela brought the technique to his debut runway show, applying the same white paint to garments and accessories throughout the collection. It has since become one of the house's most recognisable visual signatures.

What sets the bianchetto apart from other finishing techniques is its relationship with time. The paint is never intended to remain pristine. Instead, it gradually cracks, fades and wears away through use, allowing each piece to become a record of the movements and life of the person who wears it. In doing so, Martin Margiela expressed his belief that identity should be built over time by the wearer, rather than imposed by the designer.

Glenn Martens incorporated the technique into his debut presentation in China, creating a series of experiences across the country, including the Bianchetto Atelier in Shenzhen. There, visitors were invited to apply the finish to their own garments under the guidance of artisans from the Paris atelier.

Bottega Veneta was founded in Vicenza in 1966 by Renzo Zengiaro and Michele Taddei, and its most recognisable technique emerged from a practical limitation. The machinery available in the brand's early years could only handle thinner materials, making it impossible to work with leather at its usual thickness. The solution was to cut the leather into ultra-fine strips and weave them together by hand in a basket-like pattern. The result was stronger, more flexible and visually unlike anything else in luxury leather goods. They called it intrecciato, the Italian word for "woven."

What began as a solution to a manufacturing constraint soon became the defining identity of the house. Intrecciato allowed Bottega Veneta to forgo logos at a time when much of the industry was embracing them, because the craftsmanship itself had become instantly recognisable. During the decades of excess that defined the 1970s and 1980s, however, that discretion almost led to the brand's decline.

In 2019, Daniel Lee reinterpreted the intrecciato with a bolder, more sculptural and heavily textured approach, propelling Bottega Veneta to the centre of contemporary fashion culture. With Louise Trotter's arrival as Creative Director in 2024, the technique has returned to its original proportions, featuring finer leather strips and a tighter weave that creates a subtler sheen and greater flexibility. Some of the pieces from her debut collection required more than 4,000 hours of hand craftsmanship to complete.

In the spring of 1968, three artist friends who had opened their boutique on Boulevard Saint-Germain a few years earlier unveiled their first fragrance. They called it simply L'Eau—a name that felt remarkably unconventional at the time. It had no gender, made no grand claims and bore none of the usual signatures of a perfumer. Created by Desmond Knox-Leet, the English painter of the founding trio, it unknowingly introduced the phonetic thread that would come to unite the house's entire fragrance collection.

The letter O carries the defining sound of eaut (he French word for "water") and became the phoneme Diptyque chose to weave into the name of every fragrance: L'Eau, L'Autre, Philosykos, Olène, Fleur de Peau, Vetyverio, Tam Dao and Orphéon. In each, the O is the single note they all share. Even the oval framing the house's labels, one of Diptyque's most recognisable visual signatures, extends that same phonetic idea into the realm of visual identity.

Before devoting himself to painting, Knox-Leet had worked as a cryptologist, giving him a deep understanding of the power contained within a single linguistic sign.

In 1973, Céline Vipiana, the founder of Celine, was involved in a minor traffic accident at Paris's Place de l'Étoile. While waiting, her attention was drawn to the chains surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. She noticed that each link was formed by two interlocking inverted Cs. Inspired by the motif, Vipiana contacted the City of Paris to obtain permission to adapt it as an emblem for the house. It became known as the Blason Chaîne and appeared for several years on leather goods, scarves and canvas pieces before disappearing from the maison's collections for almost five decades.

When Hedi Slimane became Creative Director of Celine in 2018, he meticulously explored the house's archives and rediscovered the forgotten emblem. Renamed Triomphe, it returned with the Spring 2019 collection, Paris La Nuit, as the sculptural gold clasp of a series of box bags. Today, the Triomphe line remains one of the maison's most commercially successful collections.

Each Celine Triomphe bag is composed of 89 individual leather components crafted from premium hides sourced from Tuscan ateliers certified by the Leather Working Group. Today, the Celine Triomphe appears across handbags, footwear, jewellery and ready-to-wear, serving as a symbol that anchors the house's visual identity to its most literal Parisian origin.

In 1970, Spanish painter and designer Vicente Vela was given a remarkable commission: to create a symbol for Loewe, the house founded in Madrid in 1846 by a collective of leather artisans led by the German craftsman Enrique Loewe Roessberg.

Vela's solution was to intertwine and mirror four capital Ls into a perfectly symmetrical emblem that the industry quickly nicknamed the crab. Its inspiration came from the branding irons historically used to mark leather hides. In the Loewe Anagram, the house's artisanal origins were encoded into its very identity.

In 2014, following Jonathan Anderson's arrival, the emblem was revisited by the Paris-based design studio M/M (Paris). Before making any changes, the studio spent months studying Vela's original drawing. The underlying structure remained intact, while the lines were refined and simplified, giving the Anagram a lighter, more contemporary expression.

Today, the Anagram appears throughout Loewe's collections (on buttons, buckles, charms, embroidery and embossed leather) and continues to define the house's visual language, including this new chapter under Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez.