"It's easy for a woman to dress in a way that sends a simple message: serious or sexy or bohemian or whatever," says Bottega Veneta's creative director Tomas Maier. "It's much harder to come across in a multifaceted way. For spring, we wanted to make clothes that blur the lines, that offer a more complex idea. These are clothes for women, who'd rather not be summed up in a word or two."

Craft is paramount at this brand. It's evident in the running order descriptions, from Ondria's appia multimaterial snakeskin studded detail floral print dress to Maria's nero reseda embroidered multimaterial snakeskin beaded number. Maier's skill is in a deftness of hand – these might be clothes that are staging a protest against being pigeonholed, but that doesn't mean they're cluttered aesthetically or conceptually. As always, the signature here is intelligent elegance – expect nothing less from the brand whose slogan is "When your own initials are enough."

Photography Piotr Niepsuj