How the Bottega Veneta Cabat Bag Became the Ultimate Icon of Discreet Luxury
The logo-less—yet unmistakable—carryall has achieved cult status thanks to its signature woven intrecciato design and enduring appeal among fashion insiders and celebrities alike.
The Bottega Veneta atelier, located in a historic 18th-century villa in Montebello Vicentino, about an hour’s drive from Venice, is a valentine to haute artisanal values. Villa Schroeder-Da Porto, as it is formally known, is the architectural embodiment of the famously logo-less company’s catchphrase, “When your own initials are enough.”
The sprawling campus, which underwent a major renovation in 2013, is as lacking in superfluousness as the label’s perennially popular, unadorned Cabat bag. A mainstay of the Bottega Veneta universe, the Cabat has been reimagined over the years in various sizes and guises, including mini, small, medium, and large versions; this year, there is a new frayed-edge iteration.
Introduced in 2001 by then creative director Tomas Maier, the unlined, rectangular-shaped, top-handled tote features the house’s most recognizable signature: a woven leather technique called intrecciato, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and which appears on everything from bags and wallets to clothes and homewares. Making the Cabat requires two full days of work for two artisans—on their feet—and that’s not counting the years of training each receives.
The process begins with the workers fashioning double-faced strips of leather into triangles. They then assemble and meticulously weave them on a wooden base designed specifically for the Cabat—all while maintaining a consistent tension and diagonal orientation on each strip to ensure that the bag looks as beautiful on the inside as on the outside. It’s little wonder that the artisans are regarded by the company as stars.
Iman, photographed by Chris von Wangenheim, 1977.
The Bottega Veneta archives teem with images of different kinds of stars, ranging from Barbra Streisand and Meryl Streep to Kendall Jenner and Jacob Elordi, sporting their intrecciato carryalls. The 1970s model turned actor Lauren Hutton famously carried one in her role as a politician’s lonely wife in American Gigolo—and again on the Bottega Veneta runway in 2017. Her fellow members of New York’s disco-era beau monde, including Diana Vreeland, Truman Capote, and Andy Warhol, were habitués of Bottega Veneta’s Madison Avenue boutique. In 1975, Warhol collaborated with the company on a series of ads, and later directed and produced a proto brand video—commissions probably aided by the fact that he employed Laura Braggion, the wife of Vittorio Moltedo, a partner at Bottega Veneta and its head honcho in the U.S. (Braggion went on to lead Bottega Veneta’s design studio from 1985 to 2001.)
The Cabat, like other Bottega Veneta bags, is covered by the new Certificate of Craft program, which offers a lifetime warranty and unlimited repairs and refreshes. It’s part of an effort to promote a sustainable, multigenerational use of the company’s products. With long-term preservation strategies like these, the house is making sure that intrecciato and other techniques will be around for the foreseeable future. In another 50 years, the museum at the Bottega Veneta campus should not lack for immaculately preserved Cabats.
Lead image, clockwise from top left: Robert Longo’s Art of Collaboration, 2015, created in partnership with the brand; Lauren Hutton on the runway at the Bottega Veneta spring 2017 show in Milan; the Cabat bag with frayed edging; Andy Warhol with an intrecciato shoe, c. early 1980s; a Bottega Veneta ad from 1985; Phormium leaves in a basket-weave pattern.
Clockwise from top left: © 2025 Robert Longo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Catwalking/Getty Images; Courtesy of Bottega Veneta; © 2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy of Bottega Veneta; Lazing Bee.
