London-based brand Bottletop designs costumes for Olympic Opening Ceremony

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Aug 8, 2016

Bottletop, a British brand with sustainability and craftsmanship at its heart, worked together with local artisans from London, Salvador, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to design and create costumes worn at the Rio 2016 Opening Ceremony.

The designs, featuring thousands of hand-painted, up-cycled metal tabs, collected especially from across the state of Bahia in the North East of Brazil and thousands of up-cycled Swarovski crystals from Europe, took six months to make.

They were sported by Brazilian singer Ludmilla, who dressed a white couture body-con catsuit, and a troop of 30 dancers.

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The costumes will be on display for one day at a high-profile Bottletop event in Rio alongside the Fall/Winter 2016 collection on 16 August.

Bottletop was founded in 2002 through a design collaboration with the British luxury fashion house Mulberry. The brand has an atelier in Salvador, Brazil, where it has developed custom production techniques and sustainably sourced signature materials using up-cycled metal and certified zero deforestation leather from the Amazon. 

The sale of its designs funds the operations of a charity foundation that supports health education projects in Ethiopia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Brazil and the UK.