Botter

Botter was founded in 2017 in Paris by Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh, both Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp graduates, after their debut collection won the prestigious Festival d'Hyères grand prize. The brand's foundational thesis was specific and culturally rooted: produce Caribbean-anchored couture — drawing on Botter's Curaçao heritage and Herrebrugh's Dominican Republic heritage — fused with the Antwerp Six-derived deconstruction tradition they had trained under. The Botter vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: tailoring printed or distorted with ocean and coral-reef imagery, deconstructed seafarer's jackets, deliberately misshaped suit jackets, signature embroidered fish motifs, and a colour palette anchored to ocean blue, coral pink, sand, and ecru. Botter and Herrebrugh were named co-creative directors of Nina Ricci in 2018 (a tenure they held through 2022) while continuing to lead their own brand. The brand has presented on the Paris Men's calendar each season. Botter is independent and held by the founding duo. The brand operates no permanent retail of its own but distributes through SSENSE, MATCHES, Antonioli, GR8, Lane Crawford, and a small set of carefully chosen wholesale partners. Few brands of the post-2015 Paris menswear cohort have built such a culturally specific Caribbean-couture vocabulary while operating from inside the European luxury system.