Song Hye Kyo Signs With Bottega Veneta

In February 2020 she sat front row in Milan holding a gold-linked Chain Pouch. This September she returned to Bottega Veneta’s show as the house’s newest global ambassador.

Bottega Veneta let its creative director make the introduction. On September 18, Korea time, Louise Trotter posted a photograph of Song Hye Kyo dressed in the house’s clothes and captioned it with two words, “Welcome Hye-kyo.” The Italian house, part of the Kering group, confirmed the South Korean actress as a global brand ambassador in a formal statement that week, and Korean outlets ran the accompanying images: Song in an orange knit layered over a patch-covered Tee with patterned white trousers, and in a second look, a plain Tee and jeans

Signal. What happened: Bottega Veneta named Song Hye Kyo a global brand ambassador, and she made her first appearance in the role at the house’s Milan runway show eight days later. Exact object: a global brand ambassadorship for the South Korean actress, announced under creative director Louise Trotter with an accompanying image set. When and where: announced September 18, 2026 (Korea time); first official appearance at the Bottega Veneta Summer 2027 show in Milan on September 26, 2026, at 8:00 PM local time. Source: the house’s statement as carried by WWD and Korean press, plus Trotter’s own welcome post. Why it matters: it formalizes a relationship that started with a front-row seat in February 2020, and it adds one of the defining actors of the Korean Wave to an ambassador roster the house has leaned on heavily since walking away from Western social media in 2021. Earlier: September 2026 report on Dario Vitale’s appointment at Emporio Armani, which traced his early years at Bottega Veneta under Tomas Maier.

Both statements leaned on the same word. Song said she had long been inspired by the way the brand draws culture and art together through craftsmanship and creativity, then added, “I look forward to beginning this new chapter together.”Trotter credited Song’s commitment to craft and the broader arts, calling it “deeply aligned with Bottega Veneta.” The appointment puts Song on a roster that already includes Jacob Elordi, Julianne Moore, Vicky Krieps and the Japanese actress Rie Miyazawa, among others.

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The title is new; the relationship is not. In February 2020, during Milan Fashion Week, Song sat front row at Bottega Veneta’s Fall/Winter 2020 show, then under creative director Daniel Lee, seated beside actress Tessa Thompson and English ballet dancer Francesca Hayward. She dressed in head-to-toe black and carried the then-new Chain Pouch, a chunky gold-linked version of the house’s soft clamshell clutch and one of the signature bags of Lee’s era.

Around the same period she appeared in La Donna Che Amiamo (“The Woman We Love”), a short Bottega Veneta fashion film made for the Spring/Summer 2020 collection that cut between clothes and personal questions, from what she likes to do late at night to the moments she feels most like herself.

In the years that followed, the woven leather kept turning up in her own pictures. By this September her Instagram showed intrecciato bags with growing frequency, carried with varsity jackets, military jackets with epaulettes and the plainest white T-shirt and jeans (Vogue Korea).

For most of that stretch, her principal fashion-house affiliation sat elsewhere in Italy. Fendi named her its first Korean brand ambassador in February 2021, and she was still wearing the Roman house’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Korea’s January 2026 issue, in her fifth year with the brand. Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam has since reported the Bottega Veneta appointment as a move away from Fendi. Her other luxury ties run through jewelry and beauty: Chaumet made her an ambassador in 2018 and a global ambassador in 2024, and Guerlain named her its first Asia-Pacific skincare and makeup ambassador in January 2025.

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The first outing came fast. On September 25, Song flew out of Incheon International Airport for Milan in a wool bouclé half-zip sweater and denim, carrying Bottega Veneta’s Andiamo bag, the knotted intrecciato design Matthieu Blazy introduced in 2023.

The show opened at 8:00 PM on Saturday, September 26, in a vast, brilliantly lit white room where rows of crumpled white boxes stood in for seats, a short walk from the Navigli canal, where diners were out on the terraces that night (The Impression). It was Trotter’s third collection for the house, and Song took a front-row seat alongside Jacob Elordi, Julianne Moore and Taiwanese actress Shu Qi, with RIIZE’s Sungchan, Tyler, The Creator and Travis Scott also in the room (Korea Textile News). Elordi, whose arrival sent editors scrambling for footage, kept his sunglasses on and carried a bright red intrecciato fold-over pouch with a dark olive Harrington jacket. Every seat held a handmade leather flower, a parrot tulip or a lily or a peony, which guests took home with them (AnOther). Sound did much of the scene-setting: a piece by the artist Florian Hecker sent a different signal through each of 20 speakers, and British artist Mark Leckey supplied an original soundtrack stitched from music spanning the 1960s to the 1990s.

The clothes marked a shift. After two collections that drew some criticism for their heft, Trotter moved toward crisper fabrics, more color, airy Venetian lace, chunky crochet and long silk fringe that tangled around the body as models walked. The starting point was the calendar itself: a year after moving to Milan, Trotter had built the collection around the way people shed winter layers as a city warms up. A vivid red dress gathered and tied at the waist was layered over a full pleated skirt in the same shade, earrings looked hand-shaped from clay or woven from leather and were often deliberately mismatched, and the opening looks came with oversized, fluid bags in natural materials (Vogue Adria). “Craft really is our logo,” she told reporters after the show (WWD). Kendall Jenner closed the runway (Who What Wear).

Song documented the evening herself. In a set of Instagram photos posted afterward, she appeared in grey outerwear with a broad band of black intrecciato running around the neckline, then held up the show’s oversized paper invitation, printed in red with the house name, the date and time, and the words Summer 2027 and Milano. The last frame showed her stretched out on a sofa with the same sheet pulled over her like a blanket, eyes shut, captioned with a sleeping emoji.

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Bottega Veneta’s reliance on faces like Song’s is partly a matter of design. In January 2021, under Lee, the house deleted its Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts outright, becoming the first fashion brand to scrub its social presence entirely. Weeks later, Kering chief executive François-Henri Pinault said the brand would “lean much more on its ambassadors and fans” to carry its image across social networks instead. The house has returned only selectively since, reappearing on Weibo in 2023 with teasers for Blazy’s Fall/Winter 2023 show.

 

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A formal ambassador program followed that year. BTS member RM was named the first brand ambassador in the house’s history in 2023, followed by A$AP Rocky and Jacob Elordi in 2024 and Stray Kids member I.N in January 2025. Song is the house’s first new Korean ambassador since I.N. Coverage in the Korean business daily Hankyung drew the distinction plainly: actors like Song serve as long-term faces for a brand’s craft and cultural story, while invited idol guests such as Sungchan, who attended Bottega Veneta as a guest rather than an ambassador, bring fandom reach.

That craft story runs deep. Michele Taddei and Renzo Zengiaro founded the house in Vicenza in 1966 around intrecciato, a technique of weaving leather strips through slits cut in another piece of leather, and a 1978 two-page advertisement created by Andy Warhol gave the brand its long-running tagline about initials being enough. Gucci acquired Bottega Veneta in 2001 for $156 million and installed Tomas Maier, who led design until 2018. Lee followed, then Blazy from late 2021 until December 2024, when the house announced his exit alongside Trotter’s hiring from Carven, where she had been creative director since February 2023 after earlier posts at Lacoste and Joseph. Her debut collection, shown in Milan on September 27, 2025, leaned on fringe, sculptural silhouettes and the house’s woven and knotted leather, and she framed Bottega Veneta as something closer to a living person with its own history. Bottega Veneta reported revenue of 1.7 billion euros for 2024, and its main atelier has occupied an 18th-century villa near Montebello Vicentino since 2013. In Japan, where Rie Miyazawa already fronts the house, it has run a six-floor flagship in Ginza since 2018.

The culture side of that brief is built out in programs rather than slogans. Since 2021 the house has run Bottega for Bottegas, an annual initiative spotlighting traditional workshops around the world, and in October 2023 it opened the Accademia Labor et Ingenium, a school where its master artisans train outside students as well as staff. It has sponsored the Venice Dance Biennale through the Biennale College, begun an annual partnership with the Aspen Art Museum in 2023, and supported Dia Beacon’s 2025 spring benefit, which Trotter attended.

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Trotter’s emphasis on the broader arts has a specific echo in Song’s record. Since 2012 she has worked with Sungshin Women’s University professor Seo Kyung-duk to fund Korean-language brochures and guidebooks for museums and historic sites abroad, starting with a Korean guide at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and extending to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

The career behind the appointment began in 1996, when a 14-year-old Song won the SunKyung Smart Model Contest and debuted as a school uniform model, before landing small TV parts and a run on the sitcom Soonpoong Clinic. The KBS melodrama Autumn in My Heart made her famous across Asia in 2000 with ratings above 40 percent, All In peaked at 47.7 percent in 2003, and Full House in 2004 carried her name across the region, fixing her alongside Kim Tae-hee and Jun Ji-hyun in the trio Korean media nicknamed Tae-Hye-Ji. She later worked with Wong Kar-wai on The Grandmaster, reached a new peak with the 2016 military romance Descendants of the Sun, which hit a 41.6 percent rating at home and was viewed 2.5 billion times on China’s iQiyi, and was widely praised for The Glory, the Netflix revenge drama that won her Best Actress for television at the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards. In January 2025 she headlined the supernatural thriller Dark Nuns, which earned her a Baeksang film nomination. Promoting that film, she said she was grateful for the Tae-Hye-Ji label but would rather be recognized for her acting than her looks.

Her next role is already shaping how she looks. Tantara, known during production by the literal title Slowly, Intensely, reunites her with writer Noh Hee-kyung for a third time after Worlds Within in 2008 and That Winter, the Wind Blows in 2013. Directed by Lee Yoon-jung, the 22-episode period drama follows people fighting their way into the Korean entertainment industry between the 1960s and the 1980s, with Song as Min-ja opposite Gong Yoo, Kim Seol-hyun, Cha Seung-won and Lee Hanee (Tantara on Wikipedia). Song cut her hair short for the part, still worn as a sleek bob in Milan, and in a Harper’s Bazaar Korea interview described Min-ja as a woman who puts success ahead of love. Filming ran from January 12, 2025 to January 11, 2026, and the series is scheduled for Netflix in the fourth quarter of 2026, with streaming listings currently giving December 11 as its premiere date.