Bottega Veneta opens a store in Williamsburg, New York

Bottega Veneta has announced the opening of a new pop-up store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which will remain open throughout the summer. The summer pop-up will be hosted in a former bank and will be dedicated to small leather goods and a selection of ready-to-wear without special editions or huge media strategies. The function of this Williamsburg store is almost certainly to probe the ground: if the Upper East Side boutique represents the brand's presence in the city, its flagship, this pop-up is the first to open in an up-and-coming area of the city, the main "central" of Brooklyn gentrification. Bottega Veneta is in fact, as WWD reports, the first luxury brand ever to open its doors in Williamsburg – but the choice of the brand is quite indicative of the socio-economic transformations that faced the neighborhood. 

Bottega Veneta's new summer pop-up venue, at 33-35 Grand St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Bottega Veneta's new summer pop-up venue, at 33-35 Grand St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn

According to the website Gentrification in NYC, Williamsburg began attracting more and more of the city's youth elite as early as the early 2000s. At first the neighborhood had attracted artists, thanks to its low rents, which animated its cultural scene by paving the way for young professionals, middle-class hipsters and, finally, wealthier classes. But it is with the turn of the decade that things have begun to change:

«Since gentrification began in Williamsburg, Statista finds that home prices have increased over 210% and the resultant demographic shifted from poor and immigrant workers to upper class, hipster, and predominantly white families.».

The arrival of Bottega Veneta would therefore seem to be the next step in changing a central neighborhood for the cultural life of the city – a step that puts Williamsburg on the same street as the SoHo and Tribeca neighborhoods in Manhattan, once places in the bohemian town soon overshooted, in the words of Paul Harris of The Guardian, by «expensive chainstores, luxury boutiques, A-list celebrities and eye-bleedingly high property prices».