In Artist Uniform, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas traces how personal style shapes an artist's identity.
Step inside a shadowy exhibition space in the Guggenheim Bilbao, and you’ll hear two vocalists yearning across decades in 66-76-26, a new sound installation by Sir Steve McQueen. One voice is Nina Simone in 1966, and the other is David Bowie in 1976; both are singing the track “Wild is the Wind.”
It’s time-warping and transfixing. It’s also, weirdly, literally, very Bottega Veneta.
That is, this exact “duet,” orchestrated by McQueen, also served as the soundtrack to Bottega’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection — the first by Louise Trotter. McQueen’s interest in the brand predates Trotter’s tenure (the artist and filmmaker appeared in its clothes throughout 2024 during the Matthieu Blazy era), but this pairing of McQueen and Trotter is extra-fitting.
After all, in this new chapter for the brand, Trotter shifted Bottega toward something softer and more emotional, more wearable and less hyper-conceptual. (And not for nothing, it's more inspired by art world legends.) These codes fit the style of dress McQueen has also arrived at: Both designer and artist favor architecturally poised yet functional pieces—clothing, in other words, made to move through the world, yet imbued with enough textural flair to stand apart.
McQueen didn’t always embody Bottega so perfectly, of course. His style evolved over decades, bit by bit. But even early on, the breadcrumbs leading him to the brand were there. Take the fantastically ‘90s ensemble he wore to accept the Turner Prize in 1999 as proof that McQueen has always understood silhouette. His tan blazer may feature a crazy orange grid, but it's as perfectly tailored as the crisp white shirt underneath.
Decade by decade, his style has evolved into something less loud, but it still hits all the elements of that early banger of a fit. There’s an elevated precision to whichever brand he lands on, be it Zegna, Craig Green or Yohji Yamamoto (and he’s worn them all).
This pared-back but purposeful approach to dressing fits his creative output. His art and his many films, like Shame and the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, share a pronounced starkness. His long takes, now his signature, are, he’s said, like paintings. Ones “where people will live with that single image for the rest of their lives.”
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That tendency to let an image linger, to let a feeling build, makes him a perfect companion for a Bottega collection whose show notes talk of embracing “the romance of process.” McQueen understood the assignment all on his own: “I wanted to heighten people’s emotions, to make them more sensitive to the clothes,” he said in a statement released by the brand. “When I’ve been to fashion shows, I always think, this is the contemporary incarnation of opera, as it would have been experienced in the past. It’s not old-fashioned, it’s not dusty. In fact, it’s cutting-edge.”
The resulting show carried the same tension that marks McQueen’s work: a bridge between past and present, rigor and release. Now, a year later, the echoes of Bottega have come to Bilbao.
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