Gucci (Q20)
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Italian luxury fashion house based in Florence, Italy
- GUCCI
- Guccio Gucci S.p.A.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Gucci |
Italian luxury fashion house based in Florence, Italy |
|
Statements
1989
creative director
2019
Designer
2023
creative director
1 reference
2000
senior designer
womenswear designer
1974
freelance designer
2005
designer
designer for Gucci Group
Sabato De Sarno said that he started the new Gucci pre-fall collection by looking at the house’s history in the 1970s. Via text provided by the company, the designer added: “It was an immersion into that casual grandeur we now recognize as part of Gucci’s DNA: a daily elegance, simple yet deeply Italian, made of beautiful things designed to be worn, never ordinary. For this collection, I wanted to reimagine and reinterpret all those elements in a way that feels fresh and relevant, without nostalgia.”Reinforcing codes without leaning overly retro is a tricky balance to strike for heritage brands because, almost by definition, today’s objects of nostalgia were once yesterday’s totems of modernity. One key De Sarno strategy to crash this concurrence are his continued experiments with “wrong colors”: recognizably Gucci pieces in combinations that you would never have imagined seeing in the versions (even had they not been shot in black and white) that inspired these reinterpretations. Here notable examples included the ribbed wool ‘trompe twinsets’ (single integrated garments) in sequin-edged combinations of lilac and lemon. The showroom also contained cotton candy faux furs in the same saccharine shades, while on other garments there were more variations of his central off-olive and berry-burgundy conversation. Sharply tailored patch pocket suiting for both genders was cut in more off-kilter, vaguely mesmerizing micro-gingham color-combos.Another De Sarno trick to bring his starting point back to the future was through placing the evidently contemporary (boxy indigo denim) against the evidently historic (a cropped jacket in herringbone black and brown). Similarly a floral scarf pattern sourced from the Florence archive was reconfigured onto a cotton/wool jacquard work jacket as well as silk dresses. There were considered diversions into broadly-proportioned and powerfully colored militaria in womenswear, and tonally harmonic Ivy League in menswear. De Sarno broke the specifically 1970s spell of the bell-bottom pant by presenting his with a split running several inches up the seam from their front hems: all the better for flashing suede runners and two tone horsebit loafers.Lopapeysa pattern sweaters came spangled with sequins and cropped shearlings were brightly dyed to reflect that same Icelandic source material.
A raglan sleeve overcoat in prince of wales check, with that burgundy flashing from beneath the collar, was cut with De Sarno’s favored box pleat at the back and two lateral side-splits: retro but also beyond. A lot of this collection was about painstakingly considered detail in silhouette and visual texture generated in order to offer novelty. There were also gestures towardsfatto a manoand craft in the dress of macramé flowers and the richly finished leathers.De Sarno is a highly technical and passionately precise designer who has moved Gucci on from the everything, everywhere, all at once iteration that preceded his. Yet as Karl Lagerfeld once observed: “fashion is about two things: the evolution and the opposite.” Sometimes De Sarno might play with the idea of inserting some more oppositional jolts—whether in silhouette, storytelling, or something else entirely—against which to frame the highly specific subtleties of the Gucci evolution he continues to shape.
16 December 2024
When Fiordaliso’s 1986 hit “Non Voglio Mica La Luna” kicked in as the models walked their finale lap at Gucci today, the crowd started bopping in their seats and singing along. Sabato De Sarno’s first year at this brand hasn’t always been easy, but he set out to put a sunny, happy spin on things with his new show.His first step was returning to La Triennale, Milan’s museum of art and design and the site of his June men’s show, staging a sort of sunset in the round, with successive rooms in the oblong space shading from yellow to orange to Ancora red. At a preview earlier this week De Sarno talked fondly about his August holidays, spent with his husband and parents in Formentera—the set was designed to capture that endless summer feeling.His muse was Jackie O, a Gucci client way back when and global style icon to this day, one who’s inspired countless designers over the decades. “When I made my research in the archive I found someone describe her style as ‘casual grandeur.’ These words stayed with me for my creative period,” he explained. The Kennedy clan is freshly relevant—Ryan Murphy just announced he’s producing a new TV show about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—so the Jackie link was a bit of synchronicity.The reference wasn’t obvious from the opening look, a wool bomber paired with hip-slung slouchy trousers (previously seen in his spring collection for men) and sneakers, but as the show progressed, the archival print headscarves and big sunglasses suggested De Sarno was vibing on Jackie’s Capri era. A woven raffia coat in fluoro green with a barely perceptible floral print and printed seaside separates with matching wide-brimmed sun hats—these patterns inspired by a photo of Queen Elizabeth II in Gucci—were designed to channel the jet-set style of the ’60s.For the celebrity contingent—Kirsten Dunst, Dakota Johnson, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and the like—there was a red carpet-friendly mirror sequin sleeveless dress. Elsewhere De Sarno riffed on the iconic white jersey dresses of Tom Ford’s fall 1996 collection, only his were in deep colors and draped from gold bamboo-shaped arm bands and chokers. The Bamboo bag was the company’s big push this season. There were a number of vintage versions customized by Japanese artists in the show, and a press release made special note of an exhibition currently running in Japan showcasing the bag’s 60-year history in that country.
A shoulder strap bucket bag that also appeared frequently had horsebit detailing, which was seen, too, on new flat boots, an evolution of the brand’s familiar loafers.The show culminated in a group of looks with the jet-set spirit of today: oversize coats whose hems scraped the floor worn with tanks and boyish jeans. These might’ve represented De Sarno’s biggest advance: an elusive casual attitude that he hasn’t quite nailed before. A gloom has set in at Gucci, but watching the dancing and singing along to that old Fiordaliso song, it seemed that De Sarno had found himself some new fans. That’s a step forward, perception being such a crucial element of success.
20 September 2024
“Playing with color for me is like dancing. And when the outfit is done, that’s my wave.” Sabato De Sarno was merrily mixing his metaphors before a Gucci show this afternoon that demonstrated his steadily increasing assurance at this rhetoric-buffeted house. Today’s surfwear theme—this collection’s most eye-catching departure—was less a metaphor and more a simile that expressed shared currents. These ran between De Sarno’s lifelong passion for galleries and museums and something he said he detected in the William Finnegan memoirBarbarian Days: “He spends his 20s traveling around the world surfing, having many experiences and encounters with different people, and these are what help him to discover his own sense of freedom.” Just as Gucci’s most recent resort show was held at Tate Modern in London, this spring menswear collection—De Sarno’s first here—was shown at Milan’s Triennale di Milano.The Triennale is currently showing an exhibition about the work of designer Gae Aulenti, one of whose quotes was pinned to De Sarno’s mood board: “Tradition is not something that is inherited but is built day by day.” Here you could detect multiple fresh layerings of elements already established during the designer’s not-quite year at the house. These dwelt in the opening leather coat’s same so-calledrottengreen we saw in fall ’24; a neoprene surf slipper gridded in the same 3D interlocking-G mesh we saw in ballet flats at Tate Modern; and the designer’s ongoing commitment to a short-short. This last theme was most enjoyably unconventional when styled against the closing tailored jackets, cut in breezy cotton poplin and constructed with a lightness that betrayed De Sarno’s Neapolitan identity.The print, though, was an entirely new De Sarno x Gucci departure. There were three variations, all in multiple colorways; they featured palms, dolphins, or hibiscus leaves. Even when short-sleeve, the camp-collar shirts were stitched with a patch pocket by each hip in order to echo the profile of a chore jacket. De Sarno sometimes edged them in beaded fringe, other times delivered elements of the print in a brocade, and even on occasion dropped the whole design in embroidered beads. The long-sleeve chore jackets in the less zhuzhed-up prints were especially on my wavelength.Sometimes the print also broke through on T-shirts worn under camp-collar shirts delivered in either decreasingly widening tiers of fringe or forward-facing paillettes.
The hibiscus variation was translated into a beautiful jacquard on indigo denim. Polo shirts were layered under oversized double-G work shirts with a beautiful couture-ish curve to the back and not-quite hot pants. The harmonic turbulence between competing colors in these looks was a testament to De Sarno’s opening statement.Accessory-wise, De Sarno and his team shredded through that surf-inspired theme. From the spongy sunglass straps to the squidgy-soft fluoro-patent crossbody bags, radical color abounded. Necklaces and other jewelry were segmented into bamboo-shaped links. A group of bags were delivered in modular clusters connected by gleaming hardware and Gucci surfer charms. The extent to which this was not a literal surfing collection—almost entirely—was probably best expressed by the handsome but beach-impractical almond-toe horsebit boot. The neoprene slippers were closer to the theme yet were more meaningfully used here to give fresh traction to this designer’s increasingly deft explorations of both commonality and friction across contemporary expressions of gender through the forms in his collections. “I feel free when my thoughts and actions combine,” said De Sarno before adding: “And I feel free when my heart follows exactly what I love.” This made him sound very much like a surfer set on carving his own path.
17 June 2024
This afternoon’s edition of The Evening Standard—London’s metropolitan newspaper—lamented that all the “major” British fashion houses (Burberry aside) no longer show here. Tonight, Gucci stepped into the breach with an awesomely scaled cruise show held in the riverside Tate Modern gallery. And while the crowds outside might have been screaming for Lee Know from Stray Kids, to see Kate Moss and Alexa Chung down in the Tate’s Tanks space as we took our seats sparked a dreamily Proustian runway flashback to the London fashion scene’s pre-Brexit arcadia.Gucci’s last show in London was in 2016, 21 days before that fateful national referendum decision to leave the European Union. Sabato De Sarno said in his release that he had been drawn to show here by his personal experience of London’s tolerance and outlook: “I owe a lot to this city, it has welcomed and listened to me.” The narrative was furthered by a then-teenage Guccio Gucci having worked in the Savoy hotel as a porter back in 1899, when he was inspired to found the company.Not entirely unlike London post-Brexit, the Gucci brand post-De Sarno’s predecessor has been working through a slump. Only very recently have the newishly-installed designer’s first collections enjoyed widespread retail exposure now that Gucci’s global in-store rebranding is complete. Tonight De Sarno returned to Gucci’s city of inspirational origin to present a broadening of his creative canvas. The question was, would he be welcomed and listened to in London once again?The opening phase nicely reflected Gucci’s put-together Tuscan principessa cutting loose a little now she’d landed in London. Mixed wash denim pants were worn beneath De Sarno’s strictly tailored outerwear pieces (martingale-belted cabans, double breasted jackets) that came deformalized through fabrication in matte brown suede. Pussy bow blouses floated from their necklines.Pretty much all the shoes that came down the runway were flats in an offering that included horse-bit ballerinas with gridded rubber soles and the raised brothel creepers with branded metal segs we saw at menswear: liberation. And just as those creepers carried over from menswear, the jeans, a section of workwear popovers in poplin, and the oversized leather bombers looked like promising candidates for a spring 2025 redux back in Milan next month.
Elsewhere, high collared patinated leather short coats played protagonists in a series of looks consisting of three-way near-pastel color stories, also defined by skirts and coordinated handbag/shopping bag duets.Intricacy and ornament was worked into the collection via jeans that swished with a feathered halo of threaded hanging beads or a dégradé beaded embroidery of chamomile flowers. These flowers became an all-over pattern on later looks, where you could see through the vent in one skirt that the black-backed pattern on the outside was reflected in an equally worked yellow backed organza equivalent in the lining. Checks were blurred by their definition in more hand-applied hanging beads and studs.At the finale, the yearning violin of De Sarno’s signature version of Mina’s anthem “Ancora” was mixed against Debbie Harry’s “ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh” from “Heart of Glass.” This was both to emphasize the revived Blondie bag (which Harry was in the audience to see), as well as signal an expansion of this designer’s initially rigorously technical universe.
13 May 2024
Over the past couple of weeks, Sabato De Sarno’s debut Gucci collection has started shipping to stores and making its way out into the world. During a meeting at the brand’s headquarters earlier this week, he reported seeing a woman at a gallery wearing the lime green coat embellished with crystal fringes from last season, the one with a 27,000-euro price tag. He said he called his press team to ask if it had been loaned to her, only to learn from them that she had bought it. “I love my collection,” he said, “but to see other people love it makes me happy.”De Sarno laid out his short, sexy vision for his new Gucci last September, eschewing the eccentricity of its recent past for a more streamlined look, rooted in what he called “wardrobe” essentials. On the soundtrack today, Did Virgo and Morgan K sang about a “reset,” but if that suggested he was going to change tack, De Sarno set the record straight: “It’s just a song I like; I used to dance to it.”At that preview, he said he set himself a sort of challenge this time: to combine “what I hate with what I love to make something new.” So his opening coats were stitched from waist to hem with dégradé paillettes (he dislikes embroidery), and both a narrow bustier dress and a hip-grazing tunic were cut from double-face wool cashmere in a shade of green his studio team translated as “rotten” (a color not quite as agreeable as Rosso Ancora). The 1970s-ish, vaguely Prada-esque graphic printed on slip dresses and woven as a jacquard on a caban was a heron, if you looked closely enough.In the end, the “subversive gestures” that the press notes promised were not too much in evidence. This was a building collection, working off the framework established in round one. The opening look was a shorts suit, the jacket neatly tailored and buttoned to the neck, with a thin belt punctuating the waist and over-the-knee riding boots rising nearly to the shorts’ hems—minimal in the same general vein as De Sarno’s debut. Last season’s mini slips were refashioned in midi lengths, worn with high-rise double-G briefs underneath. An exquisite long-sleeve dress in black lace had the same willowy profile. And the slingback platforms were modeled on the loafers that are popular items from De Sarno’s launch collection.“I don’t have a theme—ever,” he said. “My theme is the clothes.” There’s a lingering question: Is that enough at a brand as big as Gucci? De Sarno is a fine technician.
The mustard peacoat at the end of the show had a covered placket in back, which could be buttoned all the way up to the collar “to embrace your body.” But moving forward, his job will be to think bigger, in all senses. It could start simple. I’m curious, for instance, about what his Gucci pants look like.
23 February 2024
“I read some critics in September who said: ‘Oh, he just did a commercial collection for the brand, blah, blah, blah.’ This isbullshit.” Sabato De Sarno pulled no punches in a preview, and—while riled by last season’s snipings—he declined to let that rhetorical turbulence affect the course of his menswear debut at Gucci this afternoon.If anything, De Sarno leaned into the headwinds of blah, blah, blah and dared them to do their worst. Last September’s show was originally due to be presented on the streets of Milan’s Brera district as a mise-en-scène. Rained off at the last minute, it was relocated to a hastily built black box at Gucci’s Milan hub. He liked the unintended black box so much—“because you had to focus on the clothes”—that he rebuilt it elsewhere for today’s show, with nearly the same soundtrack. And, De Sarno pointed out, “I opened the show with the same coat, the same silhouette, the same bag.” Model gender apart, what was different were the pants (instead of hot pants) and the loafer-brothel-creeper hybrids (instead of platform loafers). De Sarno was doubling down—he called it “mirroring”—and challenging us to reflect upon what he gave us in September and now, with fresh variations, here.Much of that blah, blah, blah is the consequence of contrast with theHa Ha Hathat came before De Sarno. His predecessor not only wore his creative heart on his sleeve—those collections weredecadent, saturated with ornate eye candy and flourish—but he threw in twins, straitjackets, severed-head replicas, Sir Elton John, and Harry Styles.De Sarno is a subtler animal. “I don’t care about the Instagram moment,” he said. Instead—from the laptop pockets and grosgrain key loops in his backpacks to the bonded-leather linings in outerwear, via the delicately rounded toes of those brothel creepers and the new shadow effect on the GG monogram—he is a details man, a purist. An outerwear geek (“Every time I buy a new coat, it’s like I’m giving myself a hug,” he said), De Sarno relished cutting Gucci’s coats with a single central vent sliced up almost to the shoulder in order to allow the pieces to flow and swoop with the models’ movement (even in double-face leathers). He took particular pleasure in the iridescent shine reflected in the finish of his faux-fur topcoat and caban.
12 January 2024
Sabato De Sarno’s Gucci debut was planned for the streets of Brera, near the arts university and the students that make the neighborhood such a lively, vibrant part of Milan. A rainy forecast forced a late-breaking venue change—a hard decision but the right one: the skies opened up half an hour before showtime. It meant we were back at the company headquarters on the edge of town where Alessandro Michele held his Gucci shows, but in every other way that counts, this was a clean break from the brand’s recent past.When Kering named De Sarno for the job in January, he was an unknown quantity, with the remit of “reinforcing the house’s fashion authority while capitalizing on its rich heritage,” said the press release announcing his appointment. His predecessor had left in November, after a seven-year run that had reversed the fortunes of the Italian heritage label and changed the look of fashion, but ended amid reports of flattening sales and falling share prices.De Sarno was plucked from the design studio at Valentino, where he rose from knitwear designer to Pierpaolo Piccioli’s closest collaborator over the course of 14 years. His former boss was in the audience today, alongside the likes of Julia Roberts, Jodie Comer, Ryan Gosling, and Paul Mescal. Mark Ronson, who produced the show soundtrack, attended with his wife Grace Gummer. Bad Bunny and Kendall Jenner were both in the crowd, though not together. There was no Jared Leto.The eccentricity that was central to Gucci’s former era was entirely absent. Instead, De Sarno set out to establish his essentials, focusing on cut and proportion, and repeating shapes for emphasis. The first look was a peak-lapeled coat in a dry charcoal wool, its only embellishment a striped grosgrain ribbon on theinsideof the back vent, worn over a simple white tank and black short-shorts with a GG buckle belt.“I started from the wardrobe,” he said in an earlier interview, “because I felt the urgency to put together the pieces that I like and that I don’t find.” The look was super-leggy: Beyond those tiny shorts, there were patent leather minis and patent leather high-slit A-line skirts, the briefest of duchesse satin party dresses embellished with crystal gridwork, and lace-edged slip dresses barely longer than teddies.
De Sarno’s Gucci is closer to Tom Ford’s, with the upfront sex appeal of those ’60s-by-way-of-the-’90s shapes, and straight riffs on Ford hits, like the white going-out top trimmed in neat rows of crystals that he paired with slouchy faded blue jeans and an embellished Jackie bag.Behind the apparent simplicity, a lot of real-world consideration went into the reinventions. De Sarno used a softer leather for the Jackie bag, added a grosgrain ribbon to the strap, updated the clasp, and put a zipper charm inside, which is lined in Gucci Rosso, his new deep shade of red. It’s a shame about the rain because the street was the right place for this collection.De Sarno has wiped the slate clean, now he can begin building.
22 September 2023
Created by Aldo Gucci in 1953, the Gucci Horsebit Loafer is 70 years old, but it still seems to be in pretty good shape. To celebrate the milestone anniversary, the house threw a festive, cool bash on the first day of Milan’s Men’s Fashion Week.Staged at art venue Spazio Maiocchi, the homage was engineered as a multidisciplinary immersive experience, with a corollary of installations, live performances, exhibitions and videos curated by Alessio Ascari, Spazio Maiocchi’s creative director. The space was transformed into a sort of countercultural meta country club called the Gucci Horsebeat Society, where artworks by 10 up-and-coming artists, mostly working with digital or AI-generated imagery, reinterpreted the iconography of the Horsebit, the metal clamp of a horse’s bridle that is one of Gucci’s most famous signifiers. Here, it came morphed and twisted into an AI-generated pattern on the thick wall-to-wall moquette carpeting the rooms; warped into distorted kinetics woven into the texture of a denim ensemble; or intruding as an almost-undetectable graphic in the classic checks of a Prince of Wales wool tailored suit.Arranged as an art installation alongside the pieces commissioned for the exhibition, looks from Gucci’s spring collection were displayed on mannequins in a room entirely wallpapered by Australian image-maker Ed Davis, whose collage motifs were also reprised on an oversized bowling-set/skater silk ensemble. Throughout the lineup, references to the archives were streamlined and rendered into augmented silhouettes; both tailoring and sport-inflected pieces had amplified proportions while retaining classic construction.A balancing act between past and future was apparent. On one hand, sartorial three-piece suits were simplified to sharp-cut, trim versions, only slightly refreshed by the elongated shapes of blazers, the shortening of sleeves and cuffs, and the revival of ’70s bootcut trousers. On the other, an undercurrent of inventive techno-quirk was perceptible in the optically treated surfaces of workwear/sporty hybrids, where the GG logo was digitally distorted into a glazed effect, laser-printed on denim-like leather, or rendered in a spongy three-dimensional weave. Equally offbeat was a shiny, liquid oversized hoodie/shorts ensemble, whose fabric woven with silver metallic threads made it shape-shifting and malleable.
A washed denim jacket tucked into wide-leg pants was thermo-incrusted with micro mirror tiles, refracting light like a wearable disco ball.The artworks displayed across the site celebrated the Horsebit’s metamorphosis. Among the most visually compelling was Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s 1998 furry bedroom, surmounted by a hanging square-heeled Horsebit loafer in red patent leather from Tom Ford’s Gucci fall 1995 show. An imposing surrealist bean-shaped wooden desk by American sculptor Pitter Patter was held up by replicas of stylish knee-length legs clad in Gucci bootcut trousers and Horsebit loafers in various styles. Entertaining and humorously artistic, the event definitely whetted the appetite for the arrival of new creative director Sabato De Sarno in September.
16 June 2023
En route to the Gucci resort show, the streets around Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul were clustered with hundreds of labor union protestors and police officers in neon vests clutching riot shields. A passel of angry men, and a few women, passed the mic to deliver impassioned speeches against the South Korean president—a perhaps not unfamiliar sight to those international visitors more familiar with the rhythms of Paris Fashion Week.It felt like a strange twist of fate, the subliminal point being that Seoul, as the current darling of the fashion world, is not so different from its sister cities. Gucci is the latest house to stage a premiere event in a metropolis that once slept in the shadow of its neighbors Tokyo and Shanghai. By now, the West understands the importance of this market, which holds a global influence. But we Koreans are a bit prouder and sharper than some brands might believe. It is no longer enough to simply show up and believe the sales will follow.Indeed, the idea of a show at Gyeongbokgung, the former royal palace where the Gucci show unfolded, induced more than one raised eyebrow among locals. Any Korean has been a hundred times over on field trips, escorting overseas guests, to see the cherry blossoms bloom, and it is the de facto destination for all foreigners shooting music videos, ad campaigns, and short films. There are many more singular places and settings the city has to offer. Yet seeing the palace lit up at twilight, devoid of tourists, with the pine-covered mountains in the background, as violins swelled in the background, playing a lilting strain from the Park Chan-Wook film Old Boy, even this jaded Seoulite felt her breath sucked away.The front row was filled with celebrities, both international (Dakota Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Saoirse Ronan) and domestic (NewJeans’s Hanni, IU, Lee Jung-jae). For many brands, that would have been enough. Yet unlike others that have merely dipped a toe in the water, Gucci dove headlong into the Han river by dedicating the entire collection to a Seoul sensibility, the vibrant street style and kinetic movement that has so captivated the world.So what did Gucci see of Seoul? Model Sora Choi opened the show in a long black padded coat over jeans, clutching a fetching baguette-shaped bag that appeared again and again (kitted out in crystals, quilted in holographic lilac).
There was a blend of bourgeois streetwear and sportswear, such as the bouclé bike shorts with the ladies-who-lunch jacket, cropped to flash the midriff, as well as a standout pale pink chiffon dress with tiered ruffles that fluttered down the runway, which was worn over a black scuba suit. Neoprene was seen as layered turtlenecks that zipped up to the chin, and paired with tweed midi skirts embellished with diamanté crystals racing up the sides.
16 May 2023
Gucci’s new creative director is Sabato De Sarno. When his appointment was announced last month, the brand said his first collection would be spring 2024. That gave the Gucci studio the job of designing this in-between season, sandwiched in the middle of Alessandro Michele’s Twinsburg sign-off and De Sarno’s opening salvo.The Gucci hub had been stripped down to puce green carpeting and burgundy banquettes for the occasion. In the middle were two sunken circles—the show notes said they “represented the collaborative circularity at the heart of Gucci’s creative community”; my seatmate called them influencer pits because they were filled with social media machers. The outer ring is where the celebrities sat: Dakota Johnson, A$AP Rocky, the Maneskin foursome, Florence Welch, and Julia Garner among them. Outside on the Via Mecenate, the crowd whooped for Chinese singer and actor Xiao Zhan; he was perched next to Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri.Like the men’s show that preceded it in January, the collection jumped this way and that, from the ’90s slimline tailoring of Tom Ford’s Gucci era to more eccentric stylings in the spirit of Michele. Both designers are part of the house’s heritage now, but Ford and Michele became famous by never doing anything halfway. Parenthetical collections like this one tend to be more noncommittal.There were a lot of ideas here, all jumbled together: heart-shaped faux-fur collars on coats and heart-shaped panniers on party dresses; crystal-trimmed portholes on a black shift and slip dresses constructed from see-through sequins; high-drama faux-fur chubbies and low-key boyfriend jeans and button-downs. And on the accessories front: oversized double-G buckles, a horse-bit handbag revived from 2003, metal spike heels about half as high as their ’90s progenitors, and a couple pairs of mukluks. The casting told a story about heritage too. Amy Wesson, Guinevere Van Seenus, and Liisa Winkler all walked vintage Tom Ford runways. To this writer’s eye, it was Winkler’s ’90s-ish, neatly cut double-breasted coat that rose above the fray. It could prove a useful starting point if Gucci does opt for a more classic, “no-season” approach going forward, as seems to be the trend in fashion at the moment.At the end of the show, design team members by the dozen emerged from three banks of elevators to take a group bow. The point was made: Gucci is far more than whomever occupies the creative director seat.
Still, it’s a crucial role, the instinctive force that stitches a collection into a unified whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Just what De Sarno will add to Gucci’s creative legacy we’ll discover in September.
24 February 2023
This was the first Gucci collection since Alessandro Michele’s departure last November. Outside the Gucci Hub that his success here helped build, the cobbled courtyard echoed with tittle-tattle and speculation as to the identity of that success-maker’s successor. The industry discombobulation recalled the equivalent show back in 2015, when we rolled up after Frida Giannini’s ousting: that grey day alongside the Hotel Diana we saw pussy bow shirts, kangaroo loafers and then—ta-dah—our first sighting of Michele. Today, no dice. The lights went down as the last model exited.A moonlighting Edward Buchanan apart, the only designer in the room I saw was Grégory “Gagary” Duprée, who would make a strong candidate for the job were he not fictional. Jeremy O. Harris, who plays Duprée so finely inEmily in Paris, wore the FUORI! (Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano) dungarees from the Twinsburg collection that marked our last sighting of Michele. It was meta. The hacks, myself included, drifted shiftily in orbit of Gucci’s executive elite in the hope of hearing an inkling. That executive elite paid scant mind, dropping a few crumbs about continuity, but mostly focusing on touching base with a front row that, Harris apart, included Idris and Sabrina Elba, Ghali, Nick and Susie Cave, Kai, Jalen Ramsey, the great Milan-based chef Massimo Bottura, and Pow3r, an elite gamer.This was a pretty committed celebrity roster for any show. On a stage in the middle of the round runway a three-piece band, Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, added a powerful musical volume. In the vacuum of that designer headliner, both room-filling strategies seemed understandable. As the Dogs began howling (they were excellent), the first look emerged. It was a white T-shirt with oversized chinos—a blank slate, Ivy League paradigm that signaled we were starting again.From this beginning unfolded a collection that Gucci said in its notes was an act of improvisation, a freestyle “reflection of the individualities represented by the multifaceted creatives and craftsmen who inhabit the house of Gucci.” In truth this was a rhetorically adroit euphemism for a crowd-designed collection which—boots and beanies apart—lacked overall coherence, yet featured some highly expressive moments. After the opener we drifted into a section of volumized tailoring which was possibly purposefully banal.
Suiting with detachable arms and legs, a rugby shirt worn above an unpicked trouser-like skirt, oversized vintage-design womenswear bags with Tom Ford era hardware and hilariously described “vintage-like” silk scarfs used ’90s-style to patch denim were more dynamic elements. We saw the occasional horse bit loafer, apparently distressed.Around halfway through, the collection began to come freighted with identity beyond the jackets featuring a 1953-issue logo boasting of outlets spanning “Florence-Rome-Milan-New York” (plus those near-ubiquitous pirate’s boots and sailor’s beanies). Volume was replaced by indie sleaze in a section epitomized by a look featuring black patent-sheened five-pocket pants, and a sheer scarlet shirt that strangely echoed the first ever look put out by Michele. The furry leopard bag and pink boots that accompanied it added a touch of hustler-ish glunge. Moto pieces, knitwear, and pastel sportswear were thrown in to evoke a purposefully peripatetic, thrown-together aesthetic. This was a collection that will be judged more for what it wasn’t than what it was—and some will doubtless decry it as disastrous because of that. Really though, it was an enforced pause before Gucci sets out on whatever new direction those executives bet on.
13 January 2023
In the minutes before today’s Gucci show, an email came in. “Welcome to Twinsburg,” read the subject line. Alessandro Michele’s concept this season—widely whispered about earlier in the week; it’s hard to keep 68 sets of twins a secret—was a reflection on identity and otherness.Michele, it turns out, is the child of an identical twin. “I am the son of two mothers,” the show notes began. Mum Eralda and Mum Giuliana “shared a genetic solidarity but, above all, they shared an intimacy which was inaccessible to others.”There’s something captivating, even uncanny, about twins—we’ve all seen the photo of Michele and his friend Jared Leto, tuxedoed doppelgängers at the 2022 Met Gala. The Gucci creative director played up the intrigue here, dividing the audience in two via a partition lined floor to ceiling with portraits of twins and look-alikes by Mark Peckmezian and staging two simultaneous shows without either half understanding until the last models made their way down the runway. Then the wall of photos lifted, revealing another set of bleachers and another set of models wearing identical looks. For the finale, the twins emerged from opposite sides of the set, stretched their arms across the runway, and joined hands: Alike, but not alike, as Marianne Faithfull intoned on the soundtrack.In true Michele fashion, the collection’s 68 looks didn’t need doubles to make an impact. He worked his way through strict tailoring, souped-up activewear, Hollywood Boulevard glitz, embroidered chinoiserie, red carpet glam, and country quilting, among other motifs. The sequined jacket that announcedFUORI!!!was Michele’s nod to an early-’70s magazine produced by the Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano, and the stuffed animal handbags were Gremlins, stars of the 1980s black comedy of the same name. A helpful fellow journo pointed out that the Gremlins had a propensity for multiplying, which gets back to Michele’s explorations around identity. He pointed out another twinning detail in the men’s garter pants that revealed a bare expanse of upper thigh. Garters are historically associated with women’s hosiery; we aren’t used to seeing that part of a man’s anatomy.Michele resurrected an equestrian-inspired bag from the early ’80s, a boxy style with a curved saddle-like flap and long shoulder strap.
Much of the other accessorizing happened around the face, with shoulder-duster earrings or sunglasses dripping in chains that served to both obscure personal identities and drive home their sameness.Visual allure and conceptual interpretations aside, it’s the solidarity of twins that Michele was really tapped into. In his post-show press conference, he seemed troubled by the climate crisis, growing anti-gay sentiment, and the renewed threat of nuclear war. “Clothes are not enough,” he said, adding that the filial atmosphere backstage was “therapeutic” for him and his team. For the audience, the show was emotionally charged in a way that you don’t often get from fashion these days. Certainly, we could all use a hand to hold. “When we are many, we are much stronger,” he argued. This show made you believe it.
23 September 2022
Alessandro Michele’s line of reasoning has never been linear. The collections he creates are prismatic affairs, as visually diverse as they are infused by meanings sometimes impervious to easy deciphering. His fascination for layered references and his love of history make him a collector of objects and memories, an archivist of galaxies of images. Not surprisingly, he called his resort collection Cosmogonies.At Gucci, Michele has brought his collections to places of esoteric, disquieting charm—the Promenade des Alycamps in Arles, an ancient necropolis, or Rome’s Musei Capitolini overlooking the Fori Imperiali, where archeological remains give off vibes of splendor and decay. But as far as magical thinking goes, Castel del Monte, where he choose to show his resort, surely upstages his previous settings. A majestic fortress in the shape of an octagonal turreted crown smack in the middle of Puglia’s flat countryside, it was built around the thirteenth century by the emperor Frederick II, a maverick monarch—poet, polyglot, mathematician, and magician—who presided over a sophisticated multicultural court of astronomers, artists, and warriors. In the castle’s construction, the number eight was obsessively repeated as an arcane bearer of meaning. It goes without saying that Michele was drawn to the genius loci of this rather extraordinary setting.“I was looking for a place which gave grace to the mythological,” he explained. “It’s a site where measurements and proportions cross each other as if by magic—the same way measurements of collars and jackets can be somehow magical.” For Michele, the mystery of Castel del Monte resonates with the enigmatic genesis of his creativity, “which operates through the need of putting together constellations of signs and symbols.”Michele’s collections seem to be part of a complex, well orchestrated flux of consciousness, gelled into attractive visual dénouements. While widely Instagram-compelling and immediate, they’re often substantiated by high-falutin, erudite citations. The idea of “cosmogonies of constellations” was born after a reading of German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s essay on Walter Benjamin, whose library was confiscated by the Gestapo, leaving him unable to access to the eclectic network of other people’s thoughts that nurtured his entire oeuvre.Michele has often built on the tension and vitality of the past to write his own version of the present. “Clothes are mediums, strata of languages,” he said.
“Today, ‘making fashion’ doesn’t mean just being a tailor, or chronicling just a one-dimensional narration. Putting together a collection has to do with talking about your idea of the world, because fashion is deeply connected to life and to humanity. Fashion isn’t just a hieroglyph that only élites can understand. It’s about life, it speaks a multitude of idioms, it’s like a huge choir from which nobody has to be excluded. It’s like being at sea, in the ocean, and casting out someone or something is not being fair to the complexity of life.”
16 May 2022
It’s been two full years since Alessandro Michele put Gucci on the runway in Milan. His homecoming was never going to be business as usual, but then Rihanna glided in, pregnant and rocking a headdress and a bare belly underneath a fur chubby. Her appearance was electrifying, and the mirrored runway multiplied the camera flashes.In his press notes, Michele made a connection between mirrors and fashion. “Clothes are capable of reflecting our image in an expanded and transfigured dimension… wearing them means to cross a transformative threshold where we become something else.” The liminal space is what turns him on, a point he made clear in his Gucci debut circa 2015.That collection put gender fluidity at the center of the conversation, where it remains today. In the intervening years, our definitions of masculine and feminine have loosened, though maybe not as much as we think. “Women are really interested in men’s suits,” he said beforehand. Maybe it’s time to reconsider what we call them, but either way there were all manner of men’s suits here: a navy double-breasted beauty that opened the show, a velvet tuxedo with crystal detailing, corduroy, plaids, and sequins.The emphasis on tailoring was the show’s organizing theme, but the headline was Michele’s collaboration with Adidas. Merging sartorial tradition and sportswear codes, he added the brand’s trademark stripes to suits and merged the famous trefoil with the Gucci logo on baseball caps. There are interesting parallels between the two companies’ IP, not just the stripes (Gucci having two in red and green, and Adidas having three in white), but also the resemblance between the Adidas trefoil and the Gucci bee.Michele mentioned being influenced by a photo of Madonna from 1993 in a dress by Laura Whitcomb, who had an early streetwear line, Label, that licensed sports brand logos. He jibed with its authenticity. Pre-Madge, fashion and fitness were different worlds. Now, collaborations are the biggest of businesses, connecting fashion to the wider culture, like celebrity does. Michele included a Guccified version of the Madonna dress in his lineup. With its deep-v neckline and ankle-length hem it was one of the few pieces that read as traditionally feminine. The others here turned cut-up elements of Adidas sweats into corset detailing like the DIY upcycling projects that proliferated on Instagram during the pandemic.
The collection took its name, Exquisite Gucci, from the Surrealist parlour game Cadavre Exquis, by which a collection of images or words were collectively assembled into a more compelling whole. Michele’s references come from all over, but together they couldn’t be anybody else but him.
25 February 2022
Gucci is about to get the Hollywood treatment. Ridley Scott, ofBlade RunnerandThelma & Louisefame, has made a juicy movie, out later this month, about the Italian family’s murderous history starring Lady Gaga. “It was a name that sounded so sweet, so seductive; synonymous with worth,” she purrs in the trailer. Of course, Gucci’s name has long been linked with Hollywood, and its connection with the movies was everywhere you looked at Alessandro Michele’s fab spring 2022 show tonight.There, in the front row, was Gwyneth Paltrow, wearing an updated version of the Tom Ford-designed red velvet Gucci tux she sported circa 1996. And there, on the runway, were a dozen celebrity “friends of Gucci,” including Macaulay Culkin, Miranda July, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Jared Leto, who has his own starring role in Scott’s film. The backdrop was the iconic Chinese Theater and Hollywood Boulevard itself—“that temple of the gods,” Michele called it.Michele credits his mother, a movie buff and an assistant in a production company, with encouraging his love of old Hollywood. But equally this collection was about contemporary Los Angeles, a place the designer first visited at the age of 27 and that he has much affection for. “LA is not a fashion city, but it’s so fashionable,” he said backstage before the show. “Sometimes they are not appropriate, but in being not appropriate they are so precise. Maybe it belongs to my way of looking at fashion—it’s personal.”When it was finally time to return to in-person shows after two seasons of the virtual experiences that lockdowns required, Los Angeles seemed the obvious choice. Seven years into his Gucci tenure, he’s presented in New York, Paris, Rome, and most often Milan, but Michele’s collections have never made more sense than this one did tonight on Hollywood Boulevard, with its neon lights and Walk of Stars.At the post-show press conference, Michele said he originally wanted to be a costume designer. He spent part of the day today at the freshly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where he admired a bow-covered Shirley Temple dress, among other pieces. On the topic of special occasion dresses, it’s fair to say he raised the bar for himself this season. With their cinematic sweep, if his gowns don’t make it to a museum, we’ll surely be seeing them soon on an awards show red carpet.
With his hungry eye, he’s absorbed all manner of Hollywood tropes, and mixed in with the screen sirens were would-be stars fresh off the bus in calico dresses, with dreams as big as their 10-gallon cowboy hats. “My Hollywood is in the streets,” he said, and the sartorial-sporty mix of wide-lapeled jackets worn with brightly colored knit leggings and running sneakers did look lifted from real life, combining post-pandemic polish with the famous California ease. As for the sex-toy jewelry, and the erotic undercurrent of skintight latex and see-through lace, Michele reminded the press conference crowd that Gucci isn’t a “monarchy of bourgeois” like many of its heritage brand peers, but has its roots in the “jet-set, artists, and cinema.” Gaga got it right. Very seductive.
3 November 2021
Gucci is about to get the Hollywood treatment. Ridley Scott, ofBlade RunnerandThelma & Louisefame, has made a juicy movie, out later this month, about the Italian family’s murderous history starring Lady Gaga. “It was a name that sounded so sweet, so seductive; synonymous with worth,” she purrs in the trailer. Of course, Gucci’s name has long been linked with Hollywood, and its connection with the movies was everywhere you looked at Alessandro Michele’s fab spring 2022 show tonight.There, in the front row, was Gwyneth Paltrow, wearing an updated version of the Tom Ford-designed red velvet Gucci tux she sported circa 1996. And there, on the runway, were a dozen celebrity “friends of Gucci,” including Macaulay Culkin, Miranda July, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Jared Leto, who has his own starring role in Scott’s film. The backdrop was the iconic Chinese Theater and Hollywood Boulevard itself—“that temple of the gods,” Michele called it.Michele credits his mother, a movie buff and an assistant in a production company, with encouraging his love of old Hollywood. But equally this collection was about contemporary Los Angeles, a place the designer first visited at the age of 27 and that he has much affection for. “LA is not a fashion city, but it’s so fashionable,” he said backstage before the show. “Sometimes they are not appropriate, but in being not appropriate they are so precise. Maybe it belongs to my way of looking at fashion—it’s personal.”When it was finally time to return to in-person shows after two seasons of the virtual experiences that lockdowns required, Los Angeles seemed the obvious choice. Seven years into his Gucci tenure, he’s presented in New York, Paris, Rome, and most often Milan, but Michele’s collections have never made more sense than this one did tonight on Hollywood Boulevard, with its neon lights and Walk of Stars.At the post-show press conference, Michele said he originally wanted to be a costume designer. He spent part of the day today at the freshly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where he admired a bow-covered Shirley Temple dress, among other pieces. On the topic of special occasion dresses, it’s fair to say he raised the bar for himself this season. With their cinematic sweep, if his gowns don’t make it to a museum, we’ll surely be seeing them soon on an awards show red carpet.
With his hungry eye, he’s absorbed all manner of Hollywood tropes, and mixed in with the screen sirens were would-be stars fresh off the bus in calico dresses, with dreams as big as their 10-gallon cowboy hats. “My Hollywood is in the streets,” he said, and the sartorial-sporty mix of wide-lapeled jackets worn with brightly colored knit leggings and running sneakers did look lifted from real life, combining post-pandemic polish with the famous California ease. As for the sex-toy jewelry, and the erotic undercurrent of skintight latex and see-through lace, Michele reminded the press conference crowd that Gucci isn’t a “monarchy of bourgeois” like many of its heritage brand peers, but has its roots in the “jet-set, artists, and cinema.” Gaga got it right. Very seductive.
3 November 2021
The soundtrack to today’s Gucci show indicates just how deeply the Italian brand has penetrated the zeitgeist. Lil Pump kicked things off with “Gucci Gang.” Rick Ross and Bhad Bhabie rapped about a “Green Gucci Suit” and “Gucci Flip Flops,” respectively, and Die Antwoord, with an assist from Dita Von Teese, crooned about “Gucci Coochie.” Alessandro Michele, the house’s creative director, is a one-man hit factory—but of course he has a lot of good material to work with.Gucci turns 100 this year. Michele’s new collection is a celebration of that milestone, and in his fashion it’s a fabulously idiosyncratic one. Not unexpectedly it reexamines the house’s history; this is standard operating procedure on anniversaries. Michele picked up on Gucci’s equestrian codes, giving them a fetishistic spin—one model cracked their whip as they made their way down the runway. He also reprised one of Tom Ford’s greatest hits, the red velvet tuxedo from fall 1996 that Michele said “made Gwyneth Paltrow famous,” with tweaks including new, more pronounced shoulders, a leather harness, and versions for both men and women.More surprising were the pieces that Michele lifted—or “quoted,” to use the company parlance—from Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga, another brand in the Kering stable. As the show began and social media started pinging with chatter about the collaboration, a press representative clarified that this was not in fact one of fashion’s familiar hookups but rather the first output from Michele’s so-called hacking lab. With Gvasalia’s permission, Michele used some of the Balenciaga designer’s iconic shapes and symbols, including the padded hip jacket of fall 2016 and spring 2017’s spandex peplum top and leggings. All these things mixed and mingled with his own symbols—glitter for day, copious amounts of marabou, and anatomical heart minaudières encrusted with rhinestones—alongside a vital new emphasis on classic tailoring.In that hacking, Michele has something in common with the sample-loving musicians on his soundtrack. But it’s a rarer occurrence in fashion, a point made clear by a written statement from François-Henri Pinault, Kering’s chairman and CEO: “I have seen how [Alessandro and Demna’s] innovative, inclusive, and iconoclastic visions are aligned with the expectations and desires of people today,” he said. “Those visions are reflected not only in their creative offerings but also in their ability to raise questions about our times and its conventions.
” The industry will be watching how, with whom, and where this concept goes next.
15 April 2021
The soundtrack to today’s Gucci show indicates just how deeply the Italian brand has penetrated the zeitgeist. Lil Pump kicked things off with “Gucci Gang.” Rick Ross and Bhad Bhabie rapped about a “Green Gucci Suit” and “Gucci Flip Flops,” respectively, and Die Antwoord, with an assist from Dita Von Teese, crooned about “Gucci Coochie.” Alessandro Michele, the house’s creative director, is a one-man hit factory—but of course he has a lot of good material to work with.Gucci turns 100 this year. Michele’s new collection is a celebration of that milestone, and in his fashion it’s a fabulously idiosyncratic one. Not unexpectedly it reexamines the house’s history; this is standard operating procedure on anniversaries. Michele picked up on Gucci’s equestrian codes, giving them a fetishistic spin—one model cracked their whip as they made their way down the runway. He also reprised one of Tom Ford’s greatest hits, the red velvet tuxedo from fall 1996 that Michele said “made Gwyneth Paltrow famous,” with tweaks including new, more pronounced shoulders, a leather harness, and versions for both men and women.More surprising were the pieces that Michele lifted—or “quoted,” to use the company parlance—from Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga, another brand in the Kering stable. As the show began and social media started pinging with chatter about the collaboration, a press representative clarified that this was not in fact one of fashion’s familiar hookups but rather the first output from Michele’s so-called hacking lab. With Gvasalia’s permission, Michele used some of the Balenciaga designer’s iconic shapes and symbols, including the padded hip jacket of fall 2016 and spring 2017’s spandex peplum top and leggings. All these things mixed and mingled with his own symbols—glitter for day, copious amounts of marabou, and anatomical heart minaudières encrusted with rhinestones—alongside a vital new emphasis on classic tailoring.In that hacking, Michele has something in common with the sample-loving musicians on his soundtrack. But it’s a rarer occurrence in fashion, a point made clear by a written statement from François-Henri Pinault, Kering’s chairman and CEO: “I have seen how [Alessandro and Demna’s] innovative, inclusive, and iconoclastic visions are aligned with the expectations and desires of people today,” he said. “Those visions are reflected not only in their creative offerings but also in their ability to raise questions about our times and its conventions.
” The industry will be watching how, with whom, and where this concept goes next.
15 April 2021
The soundtrack to today’s Gucci show indicates just how deeply the Italian brand has penetrated the zeitgeist. Lil Pump kicked things off with “Gucci Gang.” Rick Ross and Bhad Bhabie rapped about a “Green Gucci Suit” and “Gucci Flip Flops,” respectively, and Die Antwoord, with an assist from Dita Von Teese, crooned about “Gucci Coochie.” Alessandro Michele, the house’s creative director, is a one-man hit factory—but of course he has a lot of good material to work with.Gucci turns 100 this year. Michele’s new collection is a celebration of that milestone, and in his fashion it’s a fabulously idiosyncratic one. Not unexpectedly it reexamines the house’s history; this is standard operating procedure on anniversaries. Michele picked up on Gucci’s equestrian codes, giving them a fetishistic spin—one model cracked their whip as they made their way down the runway. He also reprised one of Tom Ford’s greatest hits, the red velvet tuxedo from fall 1996 that Michele said “made Gwyneth Paltrow famous,” with tweaks including new, more pronounced shoulders, a leather harness, and versions for both men and women.More surprising were the pieces that Michele lifted—or “quoted,” to use the company parlance—from Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga, another brand in the Kering stable. As the show began and social media started pinging with chatter about the collaboration, a press representative clarified that this was not in fact one of fashion’s familiar hookups but rather the first output from Michele’s so-called hacking lab. With Gvasalia’s permission, Michele used some of the Balenciaga designer’s iconic shapes and symbols, including the padded hip jacket of fall 2016 and spring 2017’s spandex peplum top and leggings. All these things mixed and mingled with his own symbols—glitter for day, copious amounts of marabou, and anatomical heart minaudières encrusted with rhinestones—alongside a vital new emphasis on classic tailoring.In that hacking, Michele has something in common with the sample-loving musicians on his soundtrack. But it’s a rarer occurrence in fashion, a point made clear by a written statement from François-Henri Pinault, Kering’s chairman and CEO: “I have seen how [Alessandro and Demna’s] innovative, inclusive, and iconoclastic visions are aligned with the expectations and desires of people today,” he said. “Those visions are reflected not only in their creative offerings but also in their ability to raise questions about our times and its conventions.
” The industry will be watching how, with whom, and where this concept goes next.
15 April 2021
In episode three ofOuverture of Something That Never Ended, the miniseries that Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele codirected to promote the spring 2021 Gucci collection, the pop star and cultural avatar Harry Styles makes a cameo wearing a pink Gucci tee tucked into eco denim washed shorts. “When it comes to making art it’s about finding the thing you’ve always wanted to see that has never been made,” Styles speaks into a phone. “It’s always an uncomfortable moment, I think, when you find the thing. You don’t know if you love it or hate it because you don’t really know what it is yet. But I think that’s the most exciting place to work in.”The words could’ve come out of his friend Alessandro Michele’s mouth this season. Faced with the impossibility of a runway show amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gucci creative director organized a collaboration with Van Sant, a filmmaker whose circuitous, oblique storytelling he’s long admired. “I could see through his eyes,” Michele said at a joint press conference earlier this month. In a season of experimentation both analog and digital, Gucci’s project—90 edited minutes shot in Rome over a period of 20 days—ranks among the most ambitious and the most esoteric.The miniseries streamed on a dedicated site dubbed GucciFest, where the brand also supported videos made by 15 emerging designers from around the world. BothOuvertureand the platform the company created to showcase it, signify the shifting role of fashion brands mid-pandemic (and in the hypothetical post-consumer future, too). Gucci and its fashion company peers are no longer just product makers, they’re also content providers. Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour, one of the designers Michele selected for GucciFest, crystalised the change that’s now in motion: “We’re still artists and people are still looking at what we’re going to do next,” Taymour told my Vogue Runway colleague Brooke Bobb. “But…there’s a way to create a more educational model or expressive model, rather than a product model.”Though it’s considerably less elaborately plotted than that other fashionable miniseries that aired this week,The Crown,Ouverture’s impressionistic episodes are nonetheless highly watchable: Florence Welch gliding through a vintage store slipping handwritten notes into the pockets of jeans or the purse of a passerby...Billie Eilish frolicking with her pet robot dogs in what looks like the exurbs of L.A...
the miniseries’ star Silvia Calderoni’s tour through Rome’s empty ancient streets by scooter at night…. Each of those vignettes charmed and in every scene the characters were wearing head-to-toe Gucci.
22 November 2020
In episode three ofOuverture of Something That Never Ended, the miniseries that Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele codirected to promote the spring 2021 Gucci collection, the pop star and cultural avatar Harry Styles makes a cameo wearing a pink Gucci tee tucked into eco denim washed shorts. “When it comes to making art it’s about finding the thing you’ve always wanted to see that has never been made,” Styles speaks into a phone. “It’s always an uncomfortable moment, I think, when you find the thing. You don’t know if you love it or hate it because you don’t really know what it is yet. But I think that’s the most exciting place to work in.”The words could’ve come out of his friend Alessandro Michele’s mouth this season. Faced with the impossibility of a runway show amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gucci creative director organized a collaboration with Van Sant, a filmmaker whose circuitous, oblique storytelling he’s long admired. “I could see through his eyes,” Michele said at a joint press conference earlier this month. In a season of experimentation both analog and digital, Gucci’s project—90 edited minutes shot in Rome over a period of 20 days—ranks among the most ambitious and the most esoteric.The miniseries streamed on a dedicated site dubbed GucciFest, where the brand also supported videos made by 15 emerging designers from around the world. BothOuvertureand the platform the company created to showcase it, signify the shifting role of fashion brands mid-pandemic (and in the hypothetical post-consumer future, too). Gucci and its fashion company peers are no longer just product makers, they’re also content providers. Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour, one of the designers Michele selected for GucciFest, crystalised the change that’s now in motion: “We’re still artists and people are still looking at what we’re going to do next,” Taymour told my Vogue Runway colleague Brooke Bobb. “But…there’s a way to create a more educational model or expressive model, rather than a product model.”Though it’s considerably less elaborately plotted than that other fashionable miniseries that aired this week,The Crown,Ouverture’s impressionistic episodes are nonetheless highly watchable: Florence Welch gliding through a vintage store slipping handwritten notes into the pockets of jeans or the purse of a passerby...Billie Eilish frolicking with her pet robot dogs in what looks like the exurbs of L.A...
the miniseries’ star Silvia Calderoni’s tour through Rome’s empty ancient streets by scooter at night…. Each of those vignettes charmed and in every scene the characters were wearing head-to-toe Gucci.
22 November 2020
In episode three ofOuverture of Something That Never Ended, the miniseries that Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele codirected to promote the spring 2021 Gucci collection, the pop star and cultural avatar Harry Styles makes a cameo wearing a pink Gucci tee tucked into eco denim washed shorts. “When it comes to making art it’s about finding the thing you’ve always wanted to see that has never been made,” Styles speaks into a phone. “It’s always an uncomfortable moment, I think, when you find the thing. You don’t know if you love it or hate it because you don’t really know what it is yet. But I think that’s the most exciting place to work in.”The words could’ve come out of his friend Alessandro Michele’s mouth this season. Faced with the impossibility of a runway show amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gucci creative director organized a collaboration with Van Sant, a filmmaker whose circuitous, oblique storytelling he’s long admired. “I could see through his eyes,” Michele said at a joint press conference earlier this month. In a season of experimentation both analog and digital, Gucci’s project—90 edited minutes shot in Rome over a period of 20 days—ranks among the most ambitious and the most esoteric.The miniseries streamed on a dedicated site dubbed GucciFest, where the brand also supported videos made by 15 emerging designers from around the world. BothOuvertureand the platform the company created to showcase it, signify the shifting role of fashion brands mid-pandemic (and in the hypothetical post-consumer future, too). Gucci and its fashion company peers are no longer just product makers, they’re also content providers. Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour, one of the designers Michele selected for GucciFest, crystalised the change that’s now in motion: “We’re still artists and people are still looking at what we’re going to do next,” Taymour told my Vogue Runway colleague Brooke Bobb. “But…there’s a way to create a more educational model or expressive model, rather than a product model.”Though it’s considerably less elaborately plotted than that other fashionable miniseries that aired this week,The Crown,Ouverture’s impressionistic episodes are nonetheless highly watchable: Florence Welch gliding through a vintage store slipping handwritten notes into the pockets of jeans or the purse of a passerby...Billie Eilish frolicking with her pet robot dogs in what looks like the exurbs of L.A...
the miniseries’ star Silvia Calderoni’s tour through Rome’s empty ancient streets by scooter at night…. Each of those vignettes charmed and in every scene the characters were wearing head-to-toe Gucci.
22 November 2020
In episode three ofOuverture of Something That Never Ended, the miniseries that Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele codirected to promote the spring 2021 Gucci collection, the pop star and cultural avatar Harry Styles makes a cameo wearing a pink Gucci tee tucked into eco denim washed shorts. “When it comes to making art it’s about finding the thing you’ve always wanted to see that has never been made,” Styles speaks into a phone. “It’s always an uncomfortable moment, I think, when you find the thing. You don’t know if you love it or hate it because you don’t really know what it is yet. But I think that’s the most exciting place to work in.”The words could’ve come out of his friend Alessandro Michele’s mouth this season. Faced with the impossibility of a runway show amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gucci creative director organized a collaboration with Van Sant, a filmmaker whose circuitous, oblique storytelling he’s long admired. “I could see through his eyes,” Michele said at a joint press conference earlier this month. In a season of experimentation both analog and digital, Gucci’s project—90 edited minutes shot in Rome over a period of 20 days—ranks among the most ambitious and the most esoteric.The miniseries streamed on a dedicated site dubbed GucciFest, where the brand also supported videos made by 15 emerging designers from around the world. BothOuvertureand the platform the company created to showcase it, signify the shifting role of fashion brands mid-pandemic (and in the hypothetical post-consumer future, too). Gucci and its fashion company peers are no longer just product makers, they’re also content providers. Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour, one of the designers Michele selected for GucciFest, crystalised the change that’s now in motion: “We’re still artists and people are still looking at what we’re going to do next,” Taymour told my Vogue Runway colleague Brooke Bobb. “But…there’s a way to create a more educational model or expressive model, rather than a product model.”Though it’s considerably less elaborately plotted than that other fashionable miniseries that aired this week,The Crown,Ouverture’s impressionistic episodes are nonetheless highly watchable: Florence Welch gliding through a vintage store slipping handwritten notes into the pockets of jeans or the purse of a passerby...Billie Eilish frolicking with her pet robot dogs in what looks like the exurbs of L.A...
the miniseries’ star Silvia Calderoni’s tour through Rome’s empty ancient streets by scooter at night…. Each of those vignettes charmed and in every scene the characters were wearing head-to-toe Gucci.
22 November 2020
As two weeks of digital fashion “shows” roll to credits, it’s the videos that capture the elusive quality of authenticity that stay with us. Some best practices: gritty can trump glam, process is everything, and designers often make for better content than models. We can all agree, I think, that the days of filming pretty people dancing in front of a camera and calling it a wrap are over.Gucci’s Alessandro Michele has never been an up-and-down the runway kind of designer. At his first resort show for the brand, held in New York back in 2015, models walked across a West Chelsea street before stepping inside the art gallery venue; it was a public-facing show before that was a thing. Last February, days before the coronavirus crisis broke out near Milan, he staged a show in the round that was spectacular and intimate at once. In retrospect, it looks rather prescient: In inviting the audience behind the scenes and exposing the backstage goings-on of the hair and makeup crews and model dressers Michele was celebrating the very things that we’re all missing so badly in COVID-19-time: human interaction, collaboration, being part of a receptive audience.“Fashion is not just what we decide to show,” Michele said on a WhatsApp video call earlier this week. “The idea that a campaign is just a piece of paper? No, there is another show in the show.” The concept for the 12-hour livestream the brand produced for resort, which he’s dubbed “Epilogue,” and staged at the glorious Renaissance-era Palazzo Sacchetti in Rome with a natural soundtrack of cicadas, is to document the advertising campaign, to capture that “show within the show.” Only this time, Michele explained, “it’s less theater. This one will be more dirty. It’s a few cameras in a very Andy Warhol way, maybe they’re looking at nothing interesting. The experiment doesn’t work if I plan too much.” Indeed, not a lot happened in the lead-up to the narrative part of the livestream that functioned as the collection reveal, but a lot got done.What Michele did plan on is that the designers in his studio would model the resort looks they worked on, putting the “we” in Gucci, in essence. On the WhatsApp call, he remembered a time as a young designer when a piece he was making was pulled for a show or a shoot and he didn’t see it again. “It was like someone tried to take from you your son.” Spotlighting his colleagues was “something beautiful,” he said, “they were so happy.”
17 July 2020
Gucci was back in its week-opening spot today after a season as the Milan closer, and Alessandro Michele got things started with a major bang, staging a show that was as spectacular as it was intimate. A week ago in New York, the fashion show was declared over (a little prematurely, given Marc Jacobs’s own enlivening experience there). Michele is among our most sensitive designers. He feels the immense strain of producing these in-person events multiple times a year—he called them rituals in his postshow presser, and he absolutely intended the religious connotations—but he also understands how the internet age potentially threatens their future. Is it live, or is it Instagram?Michele is insistent on the live experience, though he’s plenty savvy about social media too. He sent his show invitation via WhatsApp, an attention-grabbing, modern move that also happened to be a green alternative to the mountains of waste created by show production. A pair of WhatsApp’d images followed the invite; one was a snapshot of Michele doing his best #evachenpose, fingers covered in rings and nails painted an aqua blue, and the other was a close-up of a Gucci label stitched with the wordsFaconnier de Rêves.That’s “Dream Maker” to you and me.In ringmaster—high priest?—mode, Michele staged a show in the round, exposing the behind-the-scenes action of the hair and makeup teams and the model dressers at work as they prepared the 60 cast members in their looks. There were shades ofUnzipped(the 1995 fashion documentary) here, only in this instance the stage revolved, giving the audience full 360-degree views, and—the designer pointed out afterward—doing the same for the models and the backstage crew. “You were our show, and we were your show,” he said in his typically elliptical manner. Entry into the show space was through a backstage area too, and Michele was seen mingling in the crowd.Inserting viewers in the action would seem a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, but Michele found himself connecting it with childhood. Last season he paid tribute to Gucci’s Tom Ford days; there were slip dresses, exposed bras, and ’70s-by-way-of-the-’90s pantsuits—the clothes that made Michele fall in love with fashion. Here, he looked further back, taking cues from “the perfection” of little girls’ clothes—pinafore dresses, school uniforms—and, it seemed, from the outfits of those little girls’ minders, nuns to nurses included.
He did something similar at his men’s outing last month; youth, for him, equates to “beauty and freedom.” For whom does it not? But today, as then, he kept the story lively. There were hippie nods, grunge allusions, andMoulin Rouge!–on-the-prairie gowns. And no, he didn’t bypass kink entirely. A patent leather harness was the accessory du jour.As ever, the rule-breaking irreverence of his clothes was mirrored by the nontraditional beauties who wore them, but there seemed an inordinate number of overly thin models onstage this afternoon. Truer shape diversity would’ve made the communion of this Michele-orchestrated moment more powerful.A voiceover at the start and end of the show in which the Italian director Federico Fellini celebrates the art of moviemaking illuminated Michele’s intentions today. “Fellini was talking about the sacredness of cinema and the rituals of filmgoing,” the designer explained. “We all belong to the same circus,” he continued, “and I really want to go on repeating this ritual.” Michele is a believer, and in turn, he makes believers of us too.
19 February 2020
“Fashion is a sort of clock,” Alessando Michele rightly observed this afternoon. And the last five years have been set to Gucci time. Michele’s very first show—of a collection assembled in only five days—was held at the Milan menswear week in January 2015. That day, when we rolled up to the show’s space alongside the Diana Majestic that Gucci’s Frida Giannini had called home for years, all we knew was that she’d left suddenly and “the team” was being led by an in-house accessories designer. At the moment his first look came out—a guy in a red pussy-bow blouse—the share price of Gucci’s owner, the French group Kering, was hovering around 150 euros. Today it is 590 euros. Michele’s kaleidoscopic recontextualization has both transformed the fortunes of Gucci and significantly affected wider fashion.This afternoon Michele referred back to that first collection—the open-back kangaroo-lined loafers that were his first big accessories hit were among the footwear today (though no longer kangaroo-lined, of course). But this was not self-reference for the sake of it. “I haven’t got any nostalgia,” he said. “I don’t cling to the past.... I use the past because the past is a very interesting space.”Instead Michele was inviting us to “revise and reconsider” the characteristics of masculinity through an allegorical journey in clothing back to childhood. The middle of this runway was dominated by a huge pendulum that ticktocked back and forth, drawing a line in the sand beneath it. Once the clothes started coming, the pendulum revolved to swing from different angles—a Foucault-inspired demonstration not that the earth rotates, but that our perception of time is nonlinear (especially when the clock you read it by is that of fashion).Michele has long interrogated conventional masculinity—that first collection was soft power, gender-fluid, pussy-bow’ed, andpretty—and here he continued that conversation not by infantilizing his man, but by inserting pieces from preadolescence. There were knickerbockers, little black leather strap-held school shoes and shape sorter bags, and pulled-up knee socks patterned GG in a manner the Italians callgrecheand which they send well-washed boys to church in. A baby blue gingham coat and some of the jeans featured the unmistakable green bruising of grass stains: a perennial laundry-day challenge for parents of boys.
14 January 2020
Obsessions are often what fuels a great designer’s creativity. Alessandro Michele seems to acknowledge how an idée fixe can channel the sort of relentless energy and chutzpah needed to bring about change. “For men’s pre-fall I focused on formalwear, which is a bit of an obsession of mine,” he said via email. “I see it as a very fertile ground to explore and interpret, giving the possibility to create new versions. I’m interested in bringing in new elements and infusing the clothes with new meanings, or to also bring them back to their roots, but in a different way, giving them a ‘new’ life.” Indeed. When it comes to the fearless pursuit of “new meanings,” Michele’s credentials are impeccable.This pre-collection was viewed after the fall men’s collection was presented in Milan in January, marking Gucci’s comeback on the Milanese catwalk after seasons of coed shows. It was interesting to read pre-fall as a sort of prequel to a fall show devoted to redefining the meaning of masculinity; Michele did it through the unfiltered lens of childhood, a time when stereotypes of manhood aren’t yet formed and thus the freedom to forge one’s identity is supposedly still in the cards. Presenting a dedicated pre-fall menswear collection seemed to reassert masculinity as an area central to further conceptual exploration; from a stylistic standpoint, formalwear was assumed as the almost universal template of men’s style, both expressive and protective of identity.Putting tailoring at the collection’s heart and going somehow back to Gucci’s roots as a purveyor of a certain classic Italian elegance, Michele was apparently interested in breaking free from today’s ubiquitous genderless rhetoric—which at first glance seemed quite anticlimactic. After all, it was he who helped establish the fluidity of masculine/feminine high-style codes. His enormous influence still reverberates through fashion, both high and low. But being trapped in stale rhetoric isn’t Michele’s wont—quite the contrary. He’s at his best when he can push the discourse forward.So do not expect a menswear collection that retraces a path already traveled. Masculinity à la Gucci now means owning certain codes with imaginative freedom. As he said during a postshow press conference last month, “What I’d like to tell is the complexity of masculine identity. We have to learn a different way to be males.
” For pre-fall this manifesto translated into revisiting tailoring tropes in utterly romantic, extravagant ways, without detracting from its foundations as a bastion of masculine self-expression. It was definitely a virtuoso exercise on stretching classicism to its limits.
3 February 2020
Dressing is an affirmative act of presence. Clothes are signifiers of identity and metaphors of meaning; exercises in metonymy or hyperboles of self-expression. They can be a forceful political act when they express diversity or when they claim a rule-breaking mind-set. At Gucci, Alessandro Michele has fully embraced the power of aesthetic provocation that clothes can convey, polishing a game-changing visual language that courts disruption as much as it validates the force of beauty at its most whimsically inclusive. Under his visionary resolve, Gucci has become a standard-bearer for the celebration of individuality, crossing and melding generations, genders, and styles in the magpie lingua franca of its narrative.After almost five influential years at the helm of the label, Michele—as often happens with gifted visionaries—is growing and unfolding his message, adjusting and tweaking the visuals without changing the substance of the codes he has established. This new course was already fully displayed in the spring collection, where a more streamlined version of his imaginative aesthetic was presented. As usual with Michele, it caused quite a stir. But change is inherent to fashion, and controversy just fuels the conversation—and the designer is quite the provocateur. He’s good at keeping the fashion world on its toes.The pre-fall collection read as a continuum of the vision he staged in the September show. “It tells the same story about proportion, silhouette, and, above all, the balance between shape and color,” he said via email. Balancing contrasting bearers of meaning in the same outfit has always been a virtuoso exercise for Michele. Here, he somehow simplified his game, playing it subtly but no less imaginatively. Shapes had clarity, with hints to the elegance of the ’60s (trapeze dresses in solid colors or in black with cutout décolletage; short capes calling to mind Pierre Cardin’s futuristic flair; bold floral ensembles with boxy-cut little jackets) and to the free-spirited bohemia of the ’70s (gorgeous caftans in every possible length; flowing femininechemisierdresses; floor-grazing linen tunics with contrasting macramé appliqués or geometric motifs). Sharp masculine tailoring and a focus on construction were also prominent (monochrome sleeveless blazers; pantsuits with matching capelets in textured fabrics; square-cut double-breasted jackets paired with stiff pleated skirts).
And even if they were reduced compared to previous seasons, decoration and embellishments were still compelling, idiosyncratic ingredients in the collection.
10 December 2019
Alessandro Michele is a natural provocateur, but the beginning of this Gucci show might have been his most outrageous yet. The red-lit room flashed white; corrugated metal gates cranked open; and 21 models wearing white straitjackets or variations of emerged from backstage and proceeded slowly across the runway’s moving walkways. Then the lights went out and it was suddenly over. How to read such a startling prelude? As usual, Michele’s elaborate show notes offered a clue: “Fashion has a function: to let people walk through fields of possibilities . . . sacralizing every form of diversity, [and] feeding indispensable self-determination skills.”It’s no exaggeration to say that as a designer Michele is among the most influential forces in fashion—if not the most influential force. He’s made maximalists of former minimalists and turned the world on to vintage of all eras, cacophonic color and print, logos, glitter, and gender fluidity most of all. These daysGucciis an adjective and even 11-year-olds recognize the green-red-green stripe when they see it on people in the street (I know; I have an 11-year-old). The resulting rise in Gucci’s fortunes has been nothing short of staggering, but numbers don’t go up forever. And even a look as eclectic as the one Michele formulated for the brand becomes a uniform after a while. How to read those straitjackets, then? On the eve of his fifth anniversary as creative director, it was time to break free. “I’m afraid of getting bored,” he said at a postshow press conference. “I always have to try something new.”Slate cleaned, the second part of the show began. It wasn’t as abrupt a change as that dramatic opening salvo suggested, but Michele’s eye has shifted. Regard the preponderance of black, a color he’s more or less shunned until now. And consider the near absence of print. Instead he used graphic color-blocking to add interest to tailoring that evoked the lean lines of the brand’s ’70s heyday and Tom Ford’s ’90s reinterpretations of same. The biggest shocker was Michele’s embrace of sexiness. He has typically preferred quirk to kink, but not today. Riding crops (a reference to S&M and to the house’s equestrian heritage) accessorized lace-inset slip dresses, and black vinyl chokers put the finishing touch on scoop-neck leotards and high-slit midi skirts. Tailor labels on the sleeve cuffs and pant hems of those ’70s-by-way-of-’90s suits readGucci OrgasmiqueorGucci Eterotopia.
Michele’s got a merchandiser’s gift for the things that grab the eye, like those exposed brand tags. His goal here seemed different; he’s turned his attention from surface details to silhouette. That’s a more ambitious project because it’s more subtle. But if there’s anyone who can convert a generation to a what’s-old-is-new-again brand of elegance, it’s him.
22 September 2019
Alessandro Michele is a natural provocateur, but the beginning of this Gucci show might have been his most outrageous yet. The red-lit room flashed white; corrugated metal gates cranked open; and 21 models wearing white straitjackets or variations of emerged from backstage and proceeded slowly across the runway’s moving walkways. Then the lights went out and it was suddenly over. How to read such a startling prelude? As usual, Michele’s elaborate show notes offered a clue: “Fashion has a function: to let people walk through fields of possibilities . . . sacralizing every form of diversity, [and] feeding indispensable self-determination skills.”It’s no exaggeration to say that as a designer Michele is among the most influential forces in fashion—if not the most influential force. He’s made maximalists of former minimalists and turned the world on to vintage of all eras, cacophonic color and print, logos, glitter, and gender fluidity most of all. These daysGucciis an adjective and even 11-year-olds recognize the green-red-green stripe when they see it on people in the street (I know; I have an 11-year-old). The resulting rise in Gucci’s fortunes has been nothing short of staggering, but numbers don’t go up forever. And even a look as eclectic as the one Michele formulated for the brand becomes a uniform after a while. How to read those straitjackets, then? On the eve of his fifth anniversary as creative director, it was time to break free. “I’m afraid of getting bored,” he said at a postshow press conference. “I always have to try something new.”Slate cleaned, the second part of the show began. It wasn’t as abrupt a change as that dramatic opening salvo suggested, but Michele’s eye has shifted. Regard the preponderance of black, a color he’s more or less shunned until now. And consider the near absence of print. Instead he used graphic color-blocking to add interest to tailoring that evoked the lean lines of the brand’s ’70s heyday and Tom Ford’s ’90s reinterpretations of same. The biggest shocker was Michele’s embrace of sexiness. He has typically preferred quirk to kink, but not today. Riding crops (a reference to S&M and the house’s equestrian heritage) accessorized lace-inset slip dresses, and black vinyl chokers put the finishing touch on scoop-neck leotards and high-slit midi skirts. Tailor labels on the sleeve cuffs and pant hems of those ’70s-by-way-of-’90s suits readGucci OrgasmiqueorGucci Eterotopia.
Michele’s got a merchandiser’s gift for the things that grab the eye, like those exposed brand tags. His goal here seemed different; he’s turned his attention from surface details to silhouette. That’s a more ambitious project because it’s more subtle. But if there’s anyone who can convert a generation to a what’s-old-is-new-again brand of elegance, it’s him.
22 September 2019
“Because only pagan antiquity could arouse my desire. Because it was the world of the past, because it was a world that no longer exists.” Alessandro Michele quoted the historian Paul Veyne in his original French on a spray-painted bed sheet hung from the entryway of the Musei Capitolini venue where his Gucci Resort show was held tonight. It was a fitting quote for a collection presented in what’s considered the first museum in the world; Rome’s Musei Capitolini was conceived by Michelangelo in 1471 and opened to the public in 1734. Inside, Michele’s gawky beauties walked among ancient statues in near darkness, illuminated only by torches placed on guests’ seats.So far, so typical for Gucci’s creative director, who riffles through the decades—centuries, even—like other designers swiping through Instagram. This show marked a turning point for Michele, who pivoted from poetry and theory—he’s quoted everyone from William Blake to Donna Haraway—to politics. Midway through the show, a purple jacquard pantsuit came down the runway; across the back, splashed in big block letters were the words:My Body, My Choice. A few looks later, an ivory dress appeared with its midsection embroidered in the shape of a uterus; in place of ovaries there were blooming pink flowers. Elsewhere in the show, the date22.05.1978, the day the Italian law protecting legal abortion took effect, decorated the mini capelet that accessorized a pajama top and matching skirt. Still other models wore tattooed “scarves” across their mouths, as if silenced, or muzzled.At the press conference after the show, Michele explained himself: “Women have to be respected…they should be free to choose what they want.” He said he designed the collection, some of which was completed in the last 24 hours, as a reaction to “recent news.” Restrictive abortion bans designed to challenge and eventually reverse Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court level were proposed in Alabama, Missouri, Ohio, and Georgia earlier this month.Michele, and by extension Gucci, are taking a clear stance against reproductive injustice here. It’s not the first time that the brand has endorsed activism; a year ago, Gucci donated $500,000 to March for Our Lives, a gun violence prevention organization. But it is the first time Michele has made his position so explicit.To be sure, there was as much at play here as ever.
Michele made lavish reference to historical dress, draping a toga over a plaid suit and dressing male and female models in the familiar red and un-dyed white wool of Roman army uniforms. “It was important to organize this show in Rome,” he said, “to pay tribute, to glorify this place of freedom.” Also: Mickey Mouse reared his big-eared head on all manner of pieces, and there were logo’d guitar cases to beat the band. Michele’s Gucci speaks to a large, diverse audience, but this collection will resonate loudest with those who understand just how much is at stake in the fight for women’s reproductive rights. His sensitivity to the issue is bound to influence designers and brands, just as his eclectic magpie aesthetic and embrace of individual style has reverberated down through the seasons since his appointment at Gucci.
28 May 2019
Alessandro Michele’s powers are many. He reoriented fashion towards individuality, and he blasted gender norms wide open, giving usJared Letoin a dress-over-pants in the process. Not least of all, Michele is a showman nonpareil. And the show he put on today was harsh and destabilizing in the extreme, not unlike the world outside the Gucci hub, complete with lions gnashing their teeth on the soundtrack and lights pulsating brightly enough to make your retinas scream.Then there were the masks: Jason Voorhees masks, fetish store masks with 2-inch-long spikes, a stupendous brass eagle with talons clutching the jawline. At the press conference afterwards, Michele explained his fascination, saying, “A mask is hollow but also full.” It conceals and reveals; it’s a defense and a welcome sign; disorienting and its opposite. More subtle, but just as thought-provoking: the metal ear coverings. Hearing enhancing? Or hearing obliterating? The masks were runway artifice, not for sale, Michele said postshow—not with those 2-inch spikes. But he sees clothes in the same way; they’re the means by which we become what we feel we are, an open possibility.Michele gave us plenty to mediate on, especially in the context of the recent blackface uproar surrounding a Gucci balaclava jumper with a cut-out mouth and red lips. Regarding the incident, Michele said, “This must be used to create something new; this will help us do things in a different way.”The collection was as “full of little things” as always, many of them deeply personal—there’s comfort in the familiar, even for a guy as free associative as Michele. He emphasized the sober ’40s tailoring of his grandmother’s generation in jackets worn by men and women: shoulders sharp, waists nipped, and trouser legs full above ankles cinched with cord. Many of the pieces were unfinished, with basting stitches tracing seams or the outline of outsize lapels, and raw edges elsewhere. Pierrot collars, in contrast, seemed to speak of childhood whimsy and innocence, as did the nonsense wordsice,lolly, andsuckerthat appeared throughout. Different identities to slip into and out of as easily as a woman changes her Gucci sneakers for mismatched gold and silver platforms. A few of the models carried trainers from the laces, like handbags.Michele called the sneakers “game changers,” for the way they’ve liberated women from heels.
There were none of the Major League Baseball references he’s used of late, and logos for the most part were eliminated. This was a quieter, clearer Gucci, but Michele still believes in eccentricity—don’t mistake it for restraint.
24 February 2019
Alessandro Michele’s powers are many. He reoriented fashion towards individuality, and he blasted gender norms wide open, giving usJared Letoin a dress-over-pants in the process. Not least of all, Michele is a showman nonpareil. And the show he put on today was harsh and destabilizing in the extreme, not unlike the world outside the Gucci hub, complete with lions gnashing their teeth on the soundtrack and lights pulsating brightly enough to make your retinas scream.Then there were the masks: Jason Voorhees masks, fetish store masks with 2-inch-long spikes, a stupendous brass eagle with talons clutching the jawline. At the press conference afterwards, Michele explained his fascination, saying, “A mask is hollow but also full.” It conceals and reveals; it’s a defense and a welcome sign; disorienting and its opposite. More subtle, but just as thought-provoking: the metal ear coverings. Hearing enhancing? Or hearing obliterating? The masks were runway artifice, not for sale, Michele said postshow—not with those 2-inch spikes. But he sees clothes in the same way; they’re the means by which we become what we feel we are, an open possibility.Michele gave us plenty to mediate on, especially in the context of the recent blackface uproar surrounding a Gucci balaclava jumper with a cut-out mouth and red lips. Regarding the incident, Michele said, “This must be used to create something new; this will help us do things in a different way.”The collection was as “full of little things” as always, many of them deeply personal—there’s comfort in the familiar, even for a guy as free associative as Michele. He emphasized the sober ’40s tailoring of his grandmother’s generation in jackets worn by men and women: shoulders sharp, waists nipped, and trouser legs full above ankles cinched with cord. Many of the pieces were unfinished, with basting stitches tracing seams or the outline of outsize lapels, and raw edges elsewhere. Pierrot collars, in contrast, seemed to speak of childhood whimsy and innocence, as did the nonsense wordsice,lolly, andsuckerthat appeared throughout. Different identities to slip into and out of as easily as a woman changes her Gucci sneakers for mismatched gold and silver platforms. A few of the models carried trainers from the laces, like handbags.Michele called the sneakers “game changers,” for the way they’ve liberated women from heels.
There were none of the Major League Baseball references he’s used of late, and logos for the most part were eliminated. This was a quieter, clearer Gucci, but Michele still believes in eccentricity—don’t mistake it for restraint.
20 February 2019
Gucci’s Pre-Fall collection was presented without the fanfare to which the brand’s global audience has become accustomed. Indeed, it was a rather straightforward affair: an esplanade of 86 exquisitely dressed mannequins displayed in the company’s so-large-you-need-a-bicycle-to-get-around-it Milan hub, without press notes or a member of the design team to offer perspective. Creative director Alessandro Michele did not make an appearance. But you know what? It was actually kind of refreshing having the chance to experience Michele’s creations one-on-one, in close-up, since in Gucci’s mega-productions the clothes can sometimes feel like extras in a Cinecittà blockbuster, swept up by the magnitude of the visual narrative. If the sheer size of the collection was daunting, there was plenty to like.As always, since Michele took over here, every outfit was treated as a sort of mini story unto itself, as if it were born out of a fashion egg already perfectly formed: styled, accessorized, and ready to fly out of stores at rocket speed. Prominent styles included caftans—the best in exotic, rich brocades—and three-piece printed suits in which blazers were worn over elongated tunics for a new layered silhouette. Overall, the tailoring was strong: sharp-shouldered and slim-fitted with an ’80s flavor. Tweed bouclé was the predominant texture, spongy and supple; it looked delightfully odd printed with the Gucci logo or paired in rather idiosyncratic combos with sequins and chenille. The evening offering was spectacular, featuring Poiret-inspired velvet tabards embroidered with starry skies, and dramatic, fit-for-the-fairies ball gowns dripping with sequins.The lookbook’s images, staged with sloppy-looking tourist-character extras snapping pictures in the background, were shot by director and photographer Harmony Korine in the archaeological parks of Pompeii and Herculaneum, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites in southern Italy. A limited-edition book is slated to be published next year, part of a project that continues Gucci’s commitment to sustaining and promoting cultural heritage sites around the world.[
20 December 2018
Alessandro Michele makes the past live in the present. You can take that as a very obvious face-value commercial fact: He’s the fashion resurrectionist who resuscitated Gucci with his stupendously successful vintage-retrieving design formula. But there’s something more than that. When you go to his shows, you really feel shadows being spirited up. His Resort show this summer was literally a walk among the dead of the Roman Empire in the Alyscamps necropolis; seeing girls trailing long dresses past fire on that night produced some gulp-making moments. An earlier show revealed his fascination with the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Tonight, Michele took us down to another layer of history: Le Palace in Paris, the hallowed ground of a late, great ’70s and early-’80s club in an old theater in Montmartre. People came here to meet lovers and friends . . . to experience this never-ending night. “Everything is a bit dusty here, a bit abandoned, but beautiful,” he said. “But this place is full of life. The models could have been coming to the nightclub.”Cue glitter and Lurex and fringe, ostrich-feather showgirl fans, a pair of jeans cut like chaps with chains as suspenders (worn beneath a perfectly straight tweed blazer), a bedazzled jockstrap worn outside white tailored trousers, and a couple of boys in underpants, one of them a pair of Y-fronts in GG-logo canvas. Well, yes, that listing does labor the sybaritic sex club emphasis a bit too much.Michele’s favorite geeks and nerds had also gotten in—the kind of people he started putting on the men’s runway in 2015. And there were all the extravagant passages of couture-ish dresses with vastly elaborate ’80s shoulder lines you expect from the designer—and a showing of impeccably cut ’70s high-waisted, flared, nipped-torso suits.Study up on the history of Le Palace and you’ll discover that it was the haunt of Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Kenzo, Antonio Lopez, and all the great women muses of their circles, mixed in with rock stars and anyone from anywhere who looked good enough to the formidable Edwige on the door. Michele thrived on riffing out his homages to Issey Miyake’s stiff fan pleating technique and Yves Saint Laurent’s tailoring.
And then, in a frozen pause, he had Jane Birkin—legend of French music, theater, and film—stand up and sing from her song “Baby Alone in Babylone,” the title of which seemed perfectly apt for the hint of morbidity Michele likes to summon, and which so successfully syncs with the Gen Z/millennial taste for getting scared. At the beginning, he had shown an art-house movie, shot in 1970, by Italian experimental theater auteurs Leo de Berardinis and Perla Peragallo. There was grainy footage of a girl having what looked like a terrible trip in a country house, all smeary eye makeup and psychotic gestures. Weirdly, there was a passage where you couldn’t tell whether Michele had inserted his own footage, so similar to Gucci did the girl’s long, sequined, balloon-sleeved dress look. No, he said: “I have only recently come to this movie.”Weird coincidence, that. This is a designer who rummages around in the past and ends up finding himself there. The past living in the present: There is a global powerhouse of a brand built on Michele’s ability to keep magicking up that fantasia.
24 September 2018
In the beginning, it seemed a long shot for the Alessandro Michele we know—the consistent lover of shows with a dark undertone last seen quoting cyborgs and trans-humanism in the enclosed confines of Gucci’s Milan HQ—to airlift 400 guests to Arles in the South of France to see his new Resort collection in the open air. But, wow, he had a spectacular in store: a show, after dark, in the Alyscamps burial ground outside the city walls, a garden lined with the stone sarcophagi of the Roman rulers who occupied this city, the playground of the Emperor Constantine. Bells tolled, sepulchral music filled the air, a line of fire coursed along a central channel in the walkway—and the picture suddenly fit together as yet another phantasmagorical extension of the multilayered, time-collapsing world inside Michele’s head. He, too, is a Roman, after all: a conqueror of fashion in the age of digital communication and a man whose work has made persistent reference to past civilizations, death (he’s mentioned his enthusiasm for the Hollywood Forever Cemetery before now), and an imagined afterlife.That slightly flesh-creeping sensation—so zeitgeist-ily popular with the new generation of sci-fi and horror fans—came right to the fore in a state-of-the-art experiential framing of familiar pileups of Gucci clothes and accessories, as part of Michele’s ongoing multistranded plot. Show notes described his roll call of characters as “widows attending grave sites, kids playing rock ’n’ roll stars, and ladies who aren’t ladies.” Christian Lacroix, the great Arlesian couturier, painted in another part of the Alyscamps background, telling the story of how his grandfather had played in the cemetery, sleeping among the graves as a teen dare one night, “and he swore he saw a lady in white.”There was a lady in a long white gown—a ghostly bride—at the end of the show. Focusing in on the details, the collection boasted a huge inventory for women and men—or rather for whomever, in Michele’s way of pushing Gucci as a post-gendered trailblazer in fashion. So there it all was on that blazing runway—a velvet gown with a skeleton thorax embroidered on the bodice, leggings emblazoned with the wordsmemento mori, toga dresses, a super-’70s flared pantsuit, English checked tweeds, Chanel-esque jackets, tinselly fringe, sweeping cloaks, headgear, scarves, and glasses galore.
Much is made of Michele’s brilliant commercial appeal to Generation Z, but this occasion was ultimately uplifting because of the very personal intergenerational note that brought the evening to a close. Elton John came out to play a spectacular set, with Michele watching onstage as spellbound as a fanboy who has made all his dreams come true.
30 May 2018
A procession of transhumans, walking in trancelike step through a suite of operating theaters: Bolted together from the clothing of many cultures, they were Alessandro Michele’s metaphor for how people today construct their identities—a population undergoing self-regeneration through the powers of tech, Hollywood, Instagram, and Gucci. “We are the Dr. Frankenstein of our lives,” said Michele. “There’s a clinical clarity about what I am doing. I was thinking of a space that represents the creative act. I wanted to represent the lab I have in my head. It’s physical work, like a surgeon’s.”Someone was cradling a baby dragon. A couple of people had replicas of their own heads tucked under their arms. Several had their faces covered in knitted half-balaclavas, surreally suggesting a postoperative state. Others were hooded in what seemed to be lavender-lace allusions to burkas. It was sensational—in a disturbing and creepy way—as it set out to probe truths around fashion as a medium for transmitting inner states: a picture of what is happening as human brains have become irradiated in the LED light of the information age.Michele sees this condition as positive—the possibility of being liberated from the confines of the natural condition we are born into. “We exist to reproduce ourselves, but we have moved on. We are in a post-human era, for sure; it is under way.” He called to evidence the breaking down of binary gender roles that is played out in his collections. There’s no more just being girls or boys today: “Now, we have to decide what we want to be.”This Michele commentary—to be transparent—is distilled from the press conference he gave after the show, which he named Cyborg. He said the reference had been taken from his reading of the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway’s 1984 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Hand it to Michele—that text is massive food for thought, even to skim across in a quick Google search. But, then again, what of clothes?The show radiated cross-cultural meanings, a clashing of symbols by a brand that has markets to charm across the globe.
There were Russian babushka headscarves and modest, covered-up folk-costume dresses next to spangled, ’20s showgirl chain mail and jewelry; a pagoda hat and Chinese pajamas; English tweed, Scottish plaid, and a Fair Isle sweater; Italian ’80s vintage beige businessman suiting; a glam power-woman ruched dress and gold leather peplum jacket. Gucci logos were everywhere, of course, and there were branded love letters to Sega, Major League Baseball, manga, Paramount, and Russ Meyer. In other words: A zillion billion clothes and accessories guaranteed to stoke Instagram commentaries for weeks to come.
21 February 2018
A procession of transhumans, walking in trancelike step through a suite of operating theaters: Bolted together from the clothing of many cultures, they were Alessandro Michele’s metaphor for how people today construct their identities—a population undergoing self-regeneration through the powers of tech, Hollywood, Instagram, and Gucci. “We are the Dr. Frankenstein of our lives,” said Michele. “There’s a clinical clarity about what I am doing. I was thinking of a space that represents the creative act. I wanted to represent the lab I have in my head. It’s physical work, like a surgeon’s.”Someone was cradling a baby dragon. A couple of people had replicas of their own heads tucked under their arms. Several had their faces covered in knitted half-balaclavas, surreally suggesting a postoperative state. Others were hooded in what seemed to be lavender-lace allusions to burkas. It was sensational—in a disturbing and creepy way—as it set out to probe truths around fashion as a medium for transmitting inner states: a picture of what is happening as human brains have become irradiated in the LED light of the information age.Michele sees this condition as positive—the possibility of being liberated from the confines of the natural condition we are born into. “We exist to reproduce ourselves, but we have moved on. We are in a post-human era, for sure; it is under way.” He called to evidence the breaking down of binary gender roles that is played out in his collections. There’s no more just being girls or boys today: “Now, we have to decide what we want to be.”This Michele commentary—to be transparent—is distilled from the press conference he gave after the show, which he named Cyborg. He said the reference had been taken from his reading of the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway’s 1984 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Hand it to Michele—that text is massive food for thought, even to skim across in a quick Google search. But, then again, what of clothes?The show radiated cross-cultural meanings, a clashing of symbols by a brand that has markets to charm across the globe.
There were Russian babushka headscarves and modest, covered-up folk-costume dresses next to spangled, ’20s showgirl chain mail and jewelry; a pagoda hat and Chinese pajamas; English tweed, Scottish plaid, and a Fair Isle sweater; Italian ’80s vintage beige businessman suiting; a glam power-woman ruched dress and gold leather peplum jacket. Gucci logos were everywhere, of course, and there were branded love letters to Sega, Major League Baseball, manga, Paramount, and Russ Meyer. In other words: A zillion billion clothes and accessories guaranteed to stoke Instagram commentaries for weeks to come.
21 February 2018
The Gucci girl (or shall we call her Guccy?) is a horror-movie buff. One of her favorite directors is the Italian Dario Argento, whose best work in the ’70s and ’80s celebrated Rome’s nocturnal dark side. Movies likeThe Bird With the Crystal Plumage,Inferno, andDeep Redhave become classics of the genre. Alessandro Michele himself is a huge fan. With his help, for Pre-Fall the lovely Guccy roamed the Eternal City, touring a few of the bizarre locations where Argento shot his most sinister, spooky scenes, her adventurous looks a match for the quite extravagant backdrops.She started her expedition at the Casina delle Civette (which roughly translates into the Owls’ Little House), a fairy tale–like museum built in 1840 bizarrely inspired by a rustic alpine refuge. Under a wooden portal emblazoned with the mottoSapienza e solitudine(“knowledge and solitude”) she wore a glamorous, glittering fringed bomber over a demure floral-print silk shirtdress, massive hiking boots, and a cool New York Yankees cap, one of the pieces from the new Gucci for MLB (Major League Baseball) collaboration. Later, Guccy indulged her penchant for capricious quirk, wearing an ample caftan printed with a Marie Antoinette–inspired micro floral that incongruously matched the museum’s turreted rooftops. And to water the plants in the museum’s luxuriant park: a bourgeois tweed suit paired with thigh-high logo-printed boots and a checkered granny-esque blanket thrown nonchalantly over the shoulders.Driving a smart vintage Citroën DS and wearing a fringed leather jacket, Chinese-inspired tunic, and flora-printed stretch leggings, the indomitably curious Guccy headed to Quartiere Coppedè, a location favored by Argento. An eclectic marvel of a compound that mixes Liberty, Art Deco, Baroque, medieval, and Gothic influences, it was made for showing off a soigné little logoed jacket with contrasting leather piping and a vintage-y pencil skirt embroidered with peonies, butterflies, and chirping birds. Or else she opted for a cream-colored leather kimono pantsuit styled with spiky heels, a gigantic quilted tote, and her trusty Gucci for MLB cap.Thepasseggiatacontinued in the wood-paneled Aula Magna of the Ospedale Odontoiatrico George Eastman, a dental hospital built as a philanthropic project by the founder of the Eastman Kodak empire.
To attend ponderous lectures without going unnoticed, she chose either a voluminous padded puffa jacket with sporty graphic motifs and pretty floral inserts or a nylon bomber in shocking pink emblazoned with a macro logo. To add to the “look-at-me” effect, instead of a baseball cap, she wore a beaded ‘20s headdress. A bit bonkers? Well, who cares. It looked fantastic.The Dario Argento sightseeing tour was coming to a close. Tempus fugit, as they say. To round off her homage, Guccy went for anaperitivoat the monumental Hotel Mediterraneo, whose Italian Rationalist style has a disquieting, eerie feel. Sipping a glass of Champagne at the majestic Art Deco bar, she looked her glamorous best in a trapeze-cut velvet dress embroidered with glittering shooting stars. Finally, she teetered out into the Roman night on high-heeled sandals paired with woolly ribbed socks, wearing a racy golden brocade three-piece suit with high-cuffed cropped bell pants and a wide-lapel blazer. Guccy looked so enchanting, even Argento would have been mesmerized, forgetting perhaps a splatter finale and opting, for the first time in his career, for a happy ending instead.
13 December 2017
It was an intense, contradictory, and literally dark experience, this Gucci show. It was full of glitter and glam, ’80s shoulders, English tweeds, Disney and Sega references, and all the recognizable multi-everything orchestration of retooled vintage with which Alessandro Michele has revived this brand as a powerhouse with global reach. Yet one of the most commerically successful designers in the world—perhapsthemost—deliberately wanted to make it near-impossible to see his clothes. Strafing the audience with strobing spotlights in a cavernous, misty, half-lit hall full of replica antiquities, Michele essentially set out a manifesto for resisting the pressure to speed ahead, and to change what he does.Beforehand, he had warned the press what was going through his mind. “When you see the show, you will see what I’m trying to do: I want to stay in my aesthetic,” he said. “When I’m working on the collection, I’m already thinking about the space, and the music and the light. I think it’s no longer time to just talk about the clothes. In the beginning, it was something that allowed me to reflect my idea of beauty. Now it’s more than beauty. It’s a state of mind. It’s an idea of community and a really deep expression.” The words in his press release spelled it out with even more emotional force: “Resist the mantra of speed that violently leads to loosing [sic] oneself. Resist the illusion of something new at any cost.”The buildup to Michele’s immersive experience started with the invitation. Each guest was delivered a tin box, covered with what looked like occult symbols in gothic handwriting, which contained among other things a miniature set of black candles, and a pack of matches printed with the wordhypnotism. At the show itself, Michele plunged his audience into a hangar-sized space set with Greek and Roman statues, effigies of Egyptian gods, and a fragment of an Aztec temple (they were props shipped up to Milan from the Cinecittà film studios, it transpired). Some people took their seats and found they were sitting next to a bandage-swathed mummy on the bench next door.Perhaps one of the keys to Michele’s complex personality is that he lives and works in Rome, where layers upon layers of history, and the evidence of people who have lived before, are ever-present.
Yet he’s also one of the fashion masters of the digital universe, communicating his visions brilliantly through Instagram campaigns, a friend of celebrities and gatherer of quirky creative people to the brand family. It’s perhaps no wonder that this omni-connected man channels the sensibility that everything, past and present, is going on at the same time. That’s what his collections look like. “To feel the contemporary,” he said, “I need to know that something was there before. I want to touch it.”
21 September 2017
It was an intense, contradictory, and literally dark experience, this Gucci show. It was full of glitter and glam, ’80s shoulders, English tweeds, Disney and Sega references, and all the recognizable multi-everything orchestration of retooled vintage with which Alessandro Michele has revived this brand as a powerhouse with global reach. Yet one of the most commerically successful designers in the world—perhapsthemost—deliberately wanted to make it near-impossible to see his clothes. Strafing the audience with strobing spotlights in a cavernous, misty, half-lit hall full of replica antiquities, Michele essentially set out a manifesto for resisting the pressure to speed ahead, and to change what he does.Beforehand, he had warned the press what was going through his mind. “When you see the show, you will see what I’m trying to do: I want to stay in my aesthetic,” he said. “When I’m working on the collection, I’m already thinking about the space, and the music and the light. I think it’s no longer time to just talk about the clothes. In the beginning, it was something that allowed me to reflect my idea of beauty. Now it’s more than beauty. It’s a state of mind. It’s an idea of community and a really deep expression.” The words in his press release spelled it out with even more emotional force: “Resist the mantra of speed that violently leads to loosing [sic] oneself. Resist the illusion of something new at any cost.”The buildup to Michele’s immersive experience started with the invitation. Each guest was delivered a tin box, covered with what looked like occult symbols in gothic handwriting, which contained among other things a miniature set of black candles, and a pack of matches printed with the wordhypnotism. At the show itself, Michele plunged his audience into a hangar-sized space set with Greek and Roman statues, effigies of Egyptian gods, and a fragment of an Aztec temple (they were props shipped up to Milan from the Cinecittà film studios, it transpired). Some people took their seats and found they were sitting next to a bandage-swathed mummy on the bench next door.Perhaps one of the keys to Michele’s complex personality is that he lives and works in Rome, where layers upon layers of history, and the evidence of people who have lived before, are ever-present.
Yet he’s also one of the fashion masters of the digital universe, communicating his visions brilliantly through Instagram campaigns, a friend of celebrities and gatherer of quirky creative people to the brand family. It’s perhaps no wonder that this omni-connected man channels the sensibility that everything, past and present, is going on at the same time. That’s what his collections look like. “To feel the contemporary,” he said, “I need to know that something was there before. I want to touch it.”
20 September 2017
Alessandro Michele was quite honest: He wanted the Parthenon in Athens for hisGucci Cruise show. That’s how high and free the ambitions of this brand soar these days. “At the beginning, everything started in the Mediterranean, the Greek and Roman cultures,” he said. “But we couldn’t have Athens, so I went to the next big step in civilization, the Renaissance, so we came here to Florence, the fascinating metropolis of the past, the place which had the power of big money. Like,” he smiled, “Napa Valley now.” (A slip of the tongue: Silicon, we assume.)The slight location glitch had been that the Athenian cradle of democracy has a permanent preservation order which proved impermeable even to the blandishments of one of the world’s mega fashion brands in search of an ultra-exclusive Resort destination. (PS: Reasonably, how much further can these competitive Cruise trips go?) So there was Michele, stuck with plan B: the Palatine gallery of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Hardly so shabby, really, when he could have his audience walk through the Uffizi, past all the Botticellis, Uccellos, and Piero della Francescas that matter, across the Ponte Vecchio via the secret corridor built by the Medicis, and thus present his collection in front of the likes of Elton John, David Furnish,Jared Leto, Beth Ditto, Kirsten Dunst, andDakota Johnson.The vestiges of the ancient Classical theme were apparent—gilded wreaths, tiaras implanted with silver lyres—but then again, they were only a part of the extraordinary things Michele does to frame and individualize his cast of characters. There were leopard-spot turbans, head scarves, woolly bandeaux, nerdy tinted spectacles, glittery-framed sunglasses, piled-up almost-medieval hairpieces. Pearls were woven into flowing tresses or, in one case, fashioned into an all-over helmet with stuck-on beads encroaching onto the face.Michele’s Italianate magpie eye for excess and extravagance roams unfettered across centuries, taking everything from ’60s psychedelic print palazzo pantsuits to ’70s-accented Renaissance revival gowns to substantial capes, windowpane checked tweed tailoring, and sensible quilted outdoor coats. He knows how strong the following is for anything that’s embroidered or sparkles. This season he had glittery GG logo-printed tights and socks, wolf-head prints and patches, and slogans readingGuccy,Guccification, andGuccify Yourself.There is playfulness and conscious self-parody going on now.
What stops it from falling off the edge into first-degree literalness is the underlying oddness: There’s something unsettling, almost undead, about his strange breed of wan eyebrow-less girls and geeky boys. Take all the assemblages apart, and there are stores-ful of separates and accessories to continue the forward-rolling of this brand; tons for women and men, boys and girls to buy into. Perhaps there are no great political depths going on here, but there was one subtext the audience didn’t glean—because they were literally sitting on it. Michele had the lines of “A Song For Bacchus,” a poem written in the 15th century by Lorenzo de’ Medici, embroidered onto the stools upon which they were seated. “How beautiful our Youth is/That’s always flying by us/Who’d be happy let him be so:/Nothing’s sure about tomorrow.” Carpe diem. That’s a modern-enough sounding moral for most of us today.
29 May 2017
Does it seem wrong to review theGuccishow from backstage? Well, whatever, Alessandro Michele surely won’t mind. “I’m trying to follow my rules, not fashion rules,” he reasoned, pacing serenely between the aisles of racks on which the Fall collection was poised to be worn by roughly 120 girls and boys. (Wait! More of them in a minute.) Michele wasn’t making any claims that his first amalgamated female/male collection show for Gucci was a bolt from the blue, a revolutionary turn against the last season. On the contrary, he finds it easier to focus when both sexes are considered together. “This is always my world. I want to swim in my ocean,” he said, wearing a yellow Gucci-logo T-shirt and a pale baseball cap as he showed people around. He feels it’s wrong to have to “tell a new little story” every season, he said. “We need to let the world not go so fast. If you’re doing that, you don’t reflect, and in these times we need to reflect more.”Each outfit, sans models, was an exhibition in itself, with its own decorated box for shoes, bags, and jewelry standing at the ready. The boxes themselves were printed with Dutch Old Master pictures of parrot tulips cascading from vases, with iPhone charger leads Photoshopped in. On the sides were hand-scrawled words written by the artist Coco Capitán: “What will we do with all this future,’’ read one phrase. Around a corner was a poly board pinned with photographs of the tribe of unconventional-looking young people who had come together to wear the outfits—geeky boys, girls with shaved heads, and wildly flicked and structured ’80s hairdos, various glasses-wearers. The cast of Michele’s “real” types has succeeded in rebooting the fortunes of Gucci. “I don’t care about models; I care about faces!” he declared. “It’s like, a way to show humanity. It’s funny, I think the era of ‘models’ is ended.”You only have to look at Michele’s Instagram account@lallo25to see the things that obsess him visually: the formal gardens of Italian and English country houses, Renaissance paintings and classical sculptures, his friend Jared Leto, and dog Bosco. He loves England and the idea of the aristocratic English-eccentric. In a few weeks’ time, he will return to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire and home to the Cavendish family since the 16th century, to join the opening of an exhibition about the history of costume in the house, which Gucci is sponsoring.
All these simultaneous influences—the gardens, the geeks, the contemporary multilayered cultural consciousness of it all—goes into what Michele designs. It’s a busy, rich, historically eclectic, printed, and embroidered collection of clothes and accessories maxed out with deluxe micro-details like crystal-embroidered edging, and flower-printed shoe inner soles only the wearer can possibly know about.
22 February 2017
Does it seem wrong to review theGuccishow from backstage? Well, whatever, Alessandro Michele surely won’t mind. “I’m trying to follow my rules, not fashion rules,” he reasoned, pacing serenely between the aisles of racks on which the Fall collection was poised to be worn by roughly 120 girls and boys. (Wait! More of them in a minute.) Michele wasn’t making any claims that his first amalgamated female/male collection show for Gucci was a bolt from the blue, a revolutionary turn against the last season. On the contrary, he finds it easier to focus when both sexes are considered together. “This is always my world. I want to swim in my ocean,” he said, wearing a yellow Gucci-logo T-shirt and a pale baseball cap as he showed people around. He feels it’s wrong to have to “tell a new little story” every season, he said. “We need to let the world not go so fast. If you’re doing that, you don’t reflect, and in these times we need to reflect more.”Each outfit, sans models, was an exhibition in itself, with its own decorated box for shoes, bags, and jewelry standing at the ready. The boxes themselves were printed with Dutch Old Master pictures of parrot tulips cascading from vases, with iPhone charger leads Photoshopped in. On the sides were hand-scrawled words written by the artist Coco Capitán: “What will we do with all this future,’’ read one phrase. Around a corner was a poly board pinned with photographs of the tribe of unconventional-looking young people who had come together to wear the outfits—geeky boys, girls with shaved heads, and wildly flicked and structured ’80s hairdos, various glasses-wearers. The cast of Michele’s “real” types has succeeded in rebooting the fortunes of Gucci. “I don’t care about models; I care about faces!” he declared. “It’s like, a way to show humanity. It’s funny, I think the era of ‘models’ is ended.”You only have to look at Michele’s Instagram account@lallo25to see the things that obsess him visually: the formal gardens of Italian and English country houses, Renaissance paintings and classical sculptures, his friend Jared Leto, and dog Bosco. He loves England and the idea of the aristocratic English-eccentric. In a few weeks’ time, he will return to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire and home to the Cavendish family since the 16th century, to join the opening of an exhibition about the history of costume in the house, which Gucci is sponsoring.
All these simultaneous influences—the gardens, the geeks, the contemporary multilayered cultural consciousness of it all—goes into what Michele designs. It’s a busy, rich, historically eclectic, printed, and embroidered collection of clothes and accessories maxed out with deluxe micro-details like crystal-embroidered edging, and flower-printed shoe inner soles only the wearer can possibly know about.
22 February 2017
Gucci’sAlessandro Micheleis a great raconteur. His collections seem to narrate a singular tale with no real beginning or end, calling to mind the Ouroboros, the mythological serpent or dragon eating its own tail. They’re a medley of contrasts, often laced with erudite references. Yet Snoopy, Donald Duck, and a bizarre and ever-growing menagerie of rabbits, tigers, cats, dragons, and, yes, snakes are also part of his vision. It’s a wondrous, seductive fantasy world, and it’s not easy to escape its spell.Every chapter adds some new element to the narrative, eschewing categories, as well as seasonal and gender concerns. For all Michele’s love of history, this is a modern, shrewd approach, one that resonates both creatively and in the business arena. And the designer’s quite prodigious reservoir of ideas shows no sign of exhaustion; in the Pre-Fall lineup, he added layer upon layer to his already vast catalog of imagery.The lookbook was shot in Rome in two historical locations: the Antica Libreria Cascianelli, an old bookstore specializing in heraldry and art history, and the Antica Spezieria di Santa Maria della Scala, a 16th-century apothecary that apparently catered to popes. Both proved perfect as backdrops to Michele’s aesthetic and its unconventional yet fecund dialogue between past, present, and future.Stylewise, the new key word was activewear, which was given an almost lysergic treatment. Stirrup pants, the item du jour, were interpreted in übercool, slinky versions worn under almost everything, from demure pleated skirts to bon ton shirtdresses in printed silk twill. A sporty tracksuit presented in the signature Flora print looked quite sensational, with frilly ruffled shoulders and the new Marmont bag belt cinching its waist. The collection also saw the return of ’80s-style leggings; knitted in a colorful mushroom pattern, they were layered on stockings emblazoned with the Gucci logo for a truly maximalist impact.As for the already crowded Gucci menagerie, a new furry friend has just checked in: the not-so-domestic angry cat, roaring like a tiger on a fringed boho cape in rainbow stripes. Elsewhere, the ’90s-streetwear vibe that the designer has often reworked was translated into oversize bombers and hooded sweaters, sprouting from multicolored alpaca furs or paired with ethereal chiffon floral dresses.
As all other outfits in the collection, they were so richly decorated and in such bright, lively, cheerful colors, they looked almost lit from within. They could stop traffic anywhere.
13 December 2016
We are in a simulacrum of a ’70s nightclub or—given the boudoir-pink velvet banquettes, mirrors, and miles of matching carpet—maybe it’s a high-class pick-up joint. A white mist imitates cigarette smoke. It feels like being in a movie set. But something is not right. “You know, when you are in love, in a nightclub, but you are not in the right place, the person is not there?” saidAlessandro Michele, in a backstage preview, minutes before his strangely solemnGuccicreatures set their gigantically platformed feet on the plush pink runway. Oh: So we’re speaking of being all dressed up, yet brokenhearted at the same time?Maybe. There was one tiered evening dress that had a giant red embroidered heart, pierced with a jeweled dagger on the front, and the numerals “XXV” above it, which is Michele’s lucky number and part of the name of his Instagram account (@lallo25). Yet Michele’s whole point is never to dwell on a single point—it’s a phantasmagoria of vintage 20th-century pop-culture references, bound up with relics of the Renaissance that he created here. One pathway to understanding this most surreal of his collections might be the fact that he met Elton John at theGQMen of the Year awards, and he’s a fan. Hence the opening look, with its tweedy jacket and flares, and the extra-big ’70s glitter-framed shades.Florence Welchwas reading the poems of William Blake on the soundtrack.Then again, you would be rewarded by looking at the gigantically platformed footwear, and learning that Renaissance Venice also comes into it. Before the show, Michele knelt and picked up one example with a black patent 5-inch wedge and a black velvet upper, which was embroidered with a gold snake. “Prostitutes in Venice used to wear these,” he exclaimed. The necessities of glam streetwalking in a city of floods meant that elevated pattens, or chopines, soon became elaborately stylish and beautifully fashioned in the 15th century.Cut to the present, and Michele is dismantling the shoe, to demonstrate that it is actually a two-for-one purchase. “You see, there is a flat slipper inside, one you can wear separately.” The tender surprise of the rose bud–printed insole of this shoe tells as much about Michele as anything else. The lining didn’t strictly need to be there, but to discover it in a world of generically bland corners-cut product is a wonder, and a wonderful selling point. The inspiration is seen through into every product.Back to the whole, though.
There were fairy-tale chiffon dresses tipped in zigzag sparkle. EightiesUngaro–meets–New Wave cocktailwear in taffeta that was frilled, floral ruched, and straight out of the Ivana Trump era. Fragile dresses, deliberately aged, which looked as if they were relics of the Depression. And on one extraordinary long red dress, a sash spelling out the words “Hollywood Forever Cemetery.”That’s a funny thing to put in a fashion show. Michele explained that he had been to Los Angeles and was invited to Linda Ramone’s commemorative celebration party for her late husband, Johnny, at the cemetery. Surreal, yes. In the context of that, it was tempting to wonder whether the whey-faced, expressionless models were actually of this world, or the next. Either way, what they were wearing was of near haute couture level, from the hats through the embroideries, down to the gilded, rose-strewn insoles.
21 September 2016
The notion of travel is emerging as something of a fixation for the Spring 2017 menswear season. Maybe it’s the current state of endless fashion flux, caused by the stretch of the peripatetic Resort collections. Eighteen days ago,Alessandro Michelewas in London unveiling his own forGucciin the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, traveling to Rome the next day to oversee this, his final stand-alone menswear show. “I hate to travel,” he confessed backstage. How strange for one involved in fashion, for whom travel, if not always physical, is certainly ideological, from idea to idea, aesthetic to aesthetic.The latest Gucci collection, then, was about the dream of travel rather than its actuality. “You can travel in different ways,” mused Michele. “With a book, you can travel. If I change the tapestry of my chair, I sit and I travel.” Presumably that also applies to your clothing; change into a jacket scrolled with Asiatic embroideries, with dragons or tigers or even Disney characters, and you’re dressed in a different place. Or maybe a different time.The 13th-century travelogue of Marco Polo,Il Milione, was a reference Michele threw out backstage. The veracity of Polo’s travels to Cathay and Manji, now comprising China, have been much challenged, his visions credited to the fabulosity of his imagination rather than the accuracy of his reporting. Michele can be accused of the same, which is no matter. The fabulosity of Michele’s clothes, scrambling place and time, can be seen as his own imaginary travelogue, a fantasy of the foreign, colliding cultures, mixing references, and creating a hybrid that speaks of the here and now.That’s an interesting notion. Michele emblazoned clothes with the sloganModern Future. Which was ironic, given the retrospective slant constantly evident in his designs. He said backstage that they were words he didn’t understand. Which was ironic in another way, because for many what Michele is doing at Gucci is the future. For instance, his habit of showing menswear mixed with womenswear, and vice versa, is causing a shift that may prove to be seismic. Other designers have followed suit, folding their men’s shows into women’s. There is obviously a budgetary element, although as Gucci is on course to top 4 billion euros in revenue this year, it’s probably not as huge a consideration as you’d think. Creatively, it makes perfect sense for Michele.
And probably will for other designers too, given that the other part of a Gucci show—the actual garments, that magpie trawl through eras and aesthetics—has become the defining fashion look of the moment. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.
20 June 2016
Queen Elizabeth II was crowned there, Princess Diana had her funeral there, andKate Middletonand Prince William were married there. And now,Alessandro Michelehas thrown a Gucci fashion show at Westminster Abbey. Cue predictable disapproval from British traditionalists—even though the Resort collection was shown in the Cloisters, not in the hallowed Chancel where British monarchs have been crowned for centuries. But this could not have been a more sincere compliment to English tradition, as filtered through the hyper-colored, hyper-eclectic sensibilities of an anglophile Italian. Asked why he chose London and the Abbey, the enthusiastic Michele threw his arms to the vaulted roof: “To dive in this gothic sea of inspiration!” he exclaimed. “The punk, the Victorian, the eccentric—with this inspiration, I can work all my life!”It was a vast, mesmeric show of 94 looks, boys as well as girls, each one of them densely packed with detail, embellishment, and referencing art, interiors, and the piled-up layers of the archaeologies of British youth culture and street markets. There were debs in dresses that might have been back-dated to a mother’s coming-out ball in 1970; yobs in stone-washed skinhead jeans; Kensington grannies in printed silk dresses of the Thatcher era; ’90s Spice Girl monster boots and Union Jack sweaters; and a country lady with a padded husky that had somehow crossbred with a gilded, frogged hussar’s jacket. There were kilts, both posh and punk, and that is not even the beginning of an inventory of the items on show.Of course, it was all a very cleaned-up, immaculately made Italian version of the ramshackle scruffiness and don’t-care-what-anyone-thinks attitudes that actually characterize the British of whatever class. Along the way, he touched on some of the subversive styles British-born designers have contributed to the national archive of fashion, from echoes of Vivienne Westwood and her tartan bustier ball gown to the pretty-baby Victoriana of Edward Meadham of Meadham Kirchhoff. Still, in many ways, this was a continuation of everything people have come to love about Michele’s work since he took over such a relatively short time ago—from his animal-symbol embroideries to the glittery bombers, down to the embroidered bags and pearl-studded loafers.
All in all, it was a moving snapshot of what luxury fashion has become since Michele came along to reset it: not one single identifying look, but almost a hundred, and within each one, something accessible, be it a hair ornament or a pair of jeans, to pull in the next generation of customers.On a final note, Michele made a tangential remark, which may resonate more with British minds than any of his Wedgwood prints, china-dog appliqués, or punk-strapped shoes put together: “You are part of the culture of Europe!” That is really something to think about. At the end of this month, the British people must vote on whether to remain in the European Union, or whether to sever the long-standing ties that make it so easy and natural for Italians such as Michele to come to London to visit and to work, and vice versa for the British. To stage such an appreciative celebration of the borderless to-and-fro of fashion, in a building right opposite the Houses of Parliament? Let’s hope that swings a few votes in the right direction.
2 June 2016
“Catherine de’ Medici and ’70s sport.” “Renaissance biker.” “ ’80s Italian and French couture.” These words, fromLallo25, will be taken as fashion gospel after theGucciFall show today. At least 20,000 people know why—Lallo25 is the name onAlessandro Michele’s Instagram account, under which he's been posting his snaps of Italian art, antiques, and antiquities since long before a wave of success carried him to the forefront of fashion influence. Weirdly, it’s only been 12 months since Michele took over as creative director of Gucci, but that’s an eon in digital moments, during which Michele’s soft, vintage-acquiring “renaissance,” as he calls it, has made him the most-copied fashion-diviner on Earth, starting with thefur-lined loafershe designed for last Fall. Now, he’s cross-referencing puffy 1980s shoulders with the bodices from 16th-century portraits, and asking New York street artist and musician Trouble Andrew to spray-paint the Gucci “G” for a print and for biker jackets.Backstage is by far the best way to see how good Michele is. Each stand for every model looks like a mini-store in itself, with giant suede wedges and ’70s lamé disco sandals standing on shoe boxes, so you can see the serpents tooled inside the heels, the diamante-framed ’80s sunglasses, the earrings, the net-veiled hats, the velour wide-brimmed fedoras, the turbans, the ankle-length socks with the grabby graphic of the Gucci luggage-stripe around the top. And that is even before you take in the array of clothes, how he pulls from so many eras simultaneously, and just the sheer skill involved: whether it’s embroidering pearl and crystal faux necklaces onto bodices or choosing the exact tone of magenta or chrome yellow for velvet chain-strap bags that will work with the cacophony of color in the collection and yet still jump out. Michele compares what he's doing to “Talking in more than one language—there are a lot of ‘sounds.’ It’s like going on Google, or Instagram, where you can find communities. I am obsessed with street style.”While the runway show was long-delayed—hence the blissful leisure of spending time backstage viewing and discussing with Lallo25—the event turned out to be a jarring surprise, shown behind a scrim with a violent assault of strobing neon lights and white noise for an intro and exit.
Exactly why was hard to fathom—the presentation values seemed foreign to the geeky Gucci aesthetic and more akin to those of Michele’s Kering colleagueHedi SlimaneatSaint Laurentthan the sensitive Italian soul whose eyes we follow on Instagram. Michele really doesn’t need to try to be “cool.” He is a “warm” designer. Not “hot” likeTom Fordwas at Gucci. Warm. And the more he lets people cuddle up close with that warmth, the longer it will last.
24 February 2016
We talk endlessly about fashion philosophies, about a wish to embed clothes in a wider, more intense intellectual foundation. Yeah, yeah, right, it’s a jacket. But what does it mean?Gucci’s fashion philosophy—as with most everything in the Gucci universe—has been upheaved in the past 12 months, since the appointment of creative directorAlessandro Michele.Bastato sexy, to the slick hangover of theTom Fordglory years. Gucci’s clothes look different, so the thinking behind them must be different too. Gucci today earnestly references philosophers like the Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin, cross-referenced like a well-pulled-together essay. Backstage, Alessandro Michele tugged at an Aertex vest, bearing a portrait of Snoopy. “You know,” he mused, “Snoopy is like a philosopher.” He was smiling.Gucci’s philosophy today sits somewhere between Walter Benjamin and Snoopy, between highbrow and low culture. That you’re thinking with your head and not with your groin is enough of a shift from the Gucci of yore, which was sexy and ’70s, and seldom anything else. Benjamin hypothesized to the conclusion that history is written by the victors—which is key, I think, to understanding what Gucci is going through at the moment. For a time, we saw only Ford’s victorious Gucci; then Frida Giannini’s. Now, Michele. History is being repeated, but also a little rewritten.What the Fall 2016 men’s Gucci collection did was retread ground Michele’s been covering for the past year. It evolved it, a little, but it was about reaffirming the new creative direction of the house. Which, if we’re honest, isn’t that new. It’s just a new edit of an existing script. It’s new in the sense that fashion frequently is—reviving a moment that contrasts with that which immediately preceded it. Baudrillard once cited it as a dynamism of amalgamation and recycling. He hasn’t been quoted by Gucci, yet.What has been quoted is the ’70s. “The ’70s is the most powerful image, for me, for the brand,” stated Michele. “The brand has a soul—and its soul is really that kind of ’70s moment.” Oddly, he then called it “jet-set,” which is the last thing you think of when you see Michele’s bedraggled silks and brocades, although the purposefully creased suits do look a little like someone slept in them on the red-eye.
18 January 2016
The sprawling showroom whereGuccipresented its new Pre-Fall collection was entirely covered in a pop-inspired pink wallpaper printed with flying herons. It was the perfect frame for a lineup in whichAlessandro Michele’s magpie touch was on full display. From the walls the feathery creatures migrated to bombers, dresses, and bags, morphing into lavish appliqués, intricate embroideries, and shining patchworks. They were joined by a riot of decorations including butterflies, ants, snakes, tigers, swallows, kittens, trees of life, tropical foliage, strawberries, moons, and stars.The collection read as a cohesive continuum with previous seasons, a testament to the fluid creative flair that Michele seems to possess, one that’s fueled by an intuitive, emotional interpretation of historic and intellectual references. That much was apparent in Michele’s collaboration with the artist Ari Marcopoulos, who shot the lookbook you see here in a setting inspired by a Pompeian villa, shrouded in a nocturnal atmosphere reminiscent of Flemish painting that was rendered decadent, yet sleek with his ultrasharp use of lightning.If the past is the backdrop upon which Michele paints his vision, it’s imbued with a very modern attitude of individual interpretation. Indeed every item looked like it could be mixed and matched in endless combinations, regardless of season or occasion. (That clever mix is one reason why Gucci’s Milan store is packed day to night.)Glamorous intarsia fur coats in bright colors were paired with demure, pleated midi skirts printed with a carriage motif evocative of an 18th-century pattern. Fairy evening dresses in tiered tulle were sprinkled with a dusting of glitter and embroidered with whimsical patchworks, and oversize pearls were scattered on the heels of punkish spiky gladiator sandals. A slim shearling coat came bonded in a romantic floral jacquard, complete with an astrakhan collar, thick mink cuffs, and bejeweled frogging. Denim was given a pop ’70s twist with crocheted embroideries; while leather bombers and matching pleated skirts shimmered with metallic accents. The lineup exuded an optimistic eccentricity, it was a true feast for the eyes. Judging by the number of buyers crowding the showroom space, it should be a feast for Gucci’s bottom line as well.
10 December 2015
The incoming march of a new generation in Italy has begun, and the fashion world finds itself standing back spectating on the sudden arrival of a multicolored, sparkly, life-affirming parade.Alessandro Micheleis in the spotlight as the Pied Piper of change—a risk-taker and revolutionary who has not so much wiped the slate clean atGuccias doodled all over it, colored it in, stuck sequins on it, and tied it up with a grosgrain bow. His Spring lineup was a very much amplified, filled-in, decorated, and dazzling accessorized extension of the girly, geeky, vintage-like collection that he launched last season in the incongruously dark nightclubby surroundings of the show space the company had been using since the ’90s, whenTom Fordwas grooving the disco ’70s at the brand. As Michele said backstage, surrounded by a visual kaleidoscope of glittery, flower-embroidered satin, chiffon, Lurex knits, brocades, and trimmings, “It’s a big trip! Of course I am interested in personal style and quirkiness. There are things here that look vintage, but don’t really exist as vintage—it’s the illusion of it. I’m not nostalgic! I’d like to shake it up again.”Michele is having none of the slick Gucci aesthetic that descended down through the tenure of his predecessor and former boss,Frida Giannini. This time, he led his army of Gucci girls into the open air and constructed an aristo-domestic set, with a printed carpet against the backdrop of a disused train depot—a plot of broken-down, old industrial Milan which, if we are to be romantic about it, seemed something like a metaphor for Italian regeneration.What Michele is doing is certainlyveryItalian, in its references, which (if we are to be geeky about history) run the gamut from Missoni’s Lurex knits to Roberta di Camerino to Walter Albini and generally use the wonderful era of expressively luxe postwar dressmaking fabrics as a playground. Michele said he has been thinking about the Renaissance and the 1970s—both great eras for Italy in their own ways—but that his whole point is to express personality and emotion through his clothes. “Fashion is close to tenderness,” he declared, apologizing for his English. “I haven’t slept for two days!”No wonder. Apart from his sweeping in of a whole new aesthetic, the vast variety of components in the collection must have kept Michele and his teams—and the shoe, bag, hat, eyewear, and trimmings communities of Italy—working around the clock for months.
The results are mesmerizing close-up: Gucci loafers that get pearl-studded heels, damask slip-ons with ridged soccer soles, green boots with flared heels and ghillie laces in rococo blue satin, a pair of Mary Janes with studs made of bullet casings. That’s just for starters. If Gucci manages to supply even a fraction of all this stuff to its stores worldwide, it could have riotous demands on its hands.
23 September 2015
The 10-cent word that defined today's Gucci show wasdétournement. It essentially means recontextualization. Is a granny's pussy-bow blouse still a pussy-bow if a willowy teenage boy is wearing it? Or is it, as today's show notes claimed, "a renewal of possibility"? The slightly impenetrable tone of those notes actually echoed the Situationists, the French anarcho-philosophers who were so inspirational to Malcolm McLaren in his creation of the Sex Pistols. And a similarly transgressive instinct was operating on the Gucci catwalk. Welcome to the New Punk.Alessandro Michele has brought a radically different culture to Gucci. The venue today spoke volumes. No more the chilly space on Piazza Oberdan with its angular benches. Instead, we trooped to the outskirts of Milan to a ramshackle shed that was once the Farini railway station (the rails still running away into roof-height weeds). And we sat on spindly little chairs lacquered Chinese red. One might have expected a pipe of opium rather than the flute of prosecco that was served of old. How perfectly would such an additive have suited the silken languor of the collection. And yet that languor was deceptive. If it isn't exactly new, the magpie sensibility of Michele's Gucci—scouring time, place, and gender for scraps—has a Marmite impact. (Marmite, for the uninitiated, is a yeast-based food paste that its U.K. marketers confidently advertised with the slogan, "Love it or hate it.") That, in itself, is punk. So is Michele's ardent faith in the power of youth. Asked about the religious symbolism in his collection, he talked about, "the young generation as the real saints of the new world." Tattooing, piercing, decorating themselves in a new kind of geography of the body—Michele takes all of these as youthful tokens of a new shamanism.And that certainly added a significant gloss to a collection in which decoration was a more accessible notion than recontextualization. Or maybe they went hand in hand. Like the shirt in flesh-toned lace garlanded with embroidered roses. Or the pale blue leather biker heavy with studs, elaborately tattooed with birds and flowers, and paired with gold silk pants. Or the lavish green silk robe with the fur cuffs. If there was a masculine heart to each of those items, the defining details were eccentric old-ladyish. And this was Michele's most thrillingly audacious proposition.
When he spoke about the young, he insisted he meant a state of mind, rather than a chronological point in time. "The very young and the very old want to be free," he clarified. And youth and age are both so much more liberating than that long, put-upon stretch in between. That rather begged the question about why Michele didn't make his show an all-ages proposition. (Nowthatwould be truly radical.) "It's easier to communicate the message on young models," he answered, "but we are all young." Anyway, that was a credible rationale for granny-ish touches like ruffled collars, crocheted ruffs, and what looked like a doily draped around one young man's throat.Fans of Gucci's jet-set heritage need not look away. There were some perfectly credible pieces that honored the past. One trenchcoat married Gucci's most iconic pattern to sumptuous floral embroidery. A python coat was happily left as was. A suede coat over checked pants had a Helmut Berger flair. (Caveat: The trousers were flared and elongated into puddles on the floor.) The shoes, longtime fundament of the Gucci business, were another matter all together. Glittery gillies featured the classic Gucci stripe, but they also boasted fierce-some spikes on the ankle. In fact, all the shoes did, even at their most luxuriously gilded.Détournementpursues a new idea of beauty. And here it was, lush but confrontational. The New Punk.
22 June 2015
Gucci joined the spare-no-expense Resort show club today, flying guests in from around the world to see its new creative director Alessandro Michele's second women's ready-to-wear collection for the brand, and closing down West 22nd Street for the occasion. As the lights, music, and garage doors came up on a crowd that included Dakota Johnson and herFifty Shades of Greydirector, Sam Taylor-Johnson, as well as fellow Kering designers Alexander Wang and Joseph Altuzarra, the show's 62 male and female models began emerging from a building across the street.Michele's Gucci is colorful, eccentric, and unabashedly retro. He took some hits for the vintage feel of his clothes after his February go-around, but he's not backing away from the look. Resort is very much an extension of his first collection for Fall, but he made a stronger case for the new mood today. The extra months he had to prepare no doubt helped in that regard. So too, he hinted in conversation earlier this week, has the support of Gucci's CEO, Marco Bizzarri.The show started with a chevron-stripe dress: long-sleeved, just south of the knees, and easily the most sober look of the bunch. After that Michele let his freak flag fly, lifting thigh-high shift dresses from the '60s, cutting separates in lamé and Lurex-shot knits that owed more to the '70s, and even embracing kitschy Americana in the form of a lace dress with Western shirt detailing. Embroidered patches were everywhere, from the bodice of a floaty evening dress to a man's corduroy jean jacket, and there was no shortage of jewels, either: The models wore handfuls of rings, and pearls dangled from ears as well as the straps of lace-up gillies. Fur played a starring role, but there was nothing self-serious about Michele's approach, as an astrakhan coat in electric fuchsia with a zigzagging brown mink hem made evident. Joining the boyish, slightly ill-fitting pantsuits from Fall were trim little skirtsuits in crochet or curly lamb with jeweled frogging closures. Androgyny is central to his message, but so is a slightly offbeat aristocratic kind of glamour.As unexpected as it is after 10 years of Frida Giannini, Michele's vision makes a sort of sense for Gucci, which has been catering to aristocracy of the European and Hollywood kind since its jet-set heyday in the '60s and '70s. But heritage talk aside, this was the kind of collection that the fashion crowd really gets excited about.
You can carp all you want about fashion's current retro obsession—I know I have. As we've witnessed with Kering sister label Saint Laurent, where Hedi Slimane is operating along similar vintage-focused lines, we all shoot the hell out of it, and, more critically, we want to wear it.
4 June 2015
Although it was significantly less buzzy than it might've been if one of the name-brand designers rumored to have been in the running had gotten the gig—Tisci, Kane, Altuzarra, Ford, even—Alessandro Michele's Gucci show today still qualified as a moment. Fashion loves a debut; consider all the unanswered questions: Would Michele take Gucci in the more daring direction Kering chief François-Henri Pinault said was necessary for the cooling brand? Would his womenswear follow the androgynous lead of his hastily-put-together menswear show in January? What's with the mop of scruffy, shoulder-length hair? Beyond the curiosity factor, there's always a cross-your-fingers feeling to these occasions, and not just for the Gucci executives who want to put the company back in growth mode. We're all critics, but we love having someone new to cheerlead.And it's not hard to get behind Michele. A brief preshow introduction suggests he's laid-back where his predecessor, Frida Giannini, was nervy, emotional where she was more formal. The notes left on every seat quoted the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben: "Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands…Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection." Talk about putting it all on the line. Indeed, Michele's Fall collection felt like a very sharp break from Giannini's Gucci. Ford's, too—it's the in-your-face sex of his late '90s collections, after all, that lingers in the memory. The new man at the helm has a decidedly more romantic outlook. His Gucci girl is an ingenue with an eccentric side, one who looks as though she's picked out her clothes at estate sales and vintage stores, and mixed them magpie-style with handfuls of heirloom rings, chunky rimmed glasses, the occasional pompom hat, and fur-lined horse-bit loafers. The ready-to-wear ranged far and wide. From best to less-so, it included colorful coats with fur cuffs and military leanings; fluttery, shapeless botanic print dresses; and unlined, skin-baring point d'esprit separates. Many of the pieces were pressed with creases at odd places—several inches above the hem of trousers, down the side of a jacket, or all over in the case of a blue plissé dress. "I love the idea that a dress has a memory," Michele said.The overriding impression of this collection was one of youthful naïveté.
As playful and irreverent as it was, it lacked a bit for sophistication, which is as much a part of the Italian house's heritage as the interlocking G's that appeared on the new, rectangular bag shape. There's a significant amount of goodwill for Michele, and it's clear from Instagram that he wrapped a lot of the audience in his poetic embrace—from the looks of it they'll be wrapping themselves in his fur with embroidered crystal birds on the back. But to make his vision stick, he'll need to give it a lot more substance going forward.
25 February 2015
Gucci couldn't wait for the future a second longer. Frida Giannini left the company earlier than planned, and the menswear collection she was to present today was replaced in every last detail, right down to the model casting and the seating arrangement for the show. And all in five days. Scarcely credible, but if you ever needed proof of the ancient adage that where there's a will, there's a way, then here it was.Inevitably, the droopy, androgynous languor of the show and its blurred gender divide (a curious concomitant of Prada's presentation last night) cast a very different spell from Giannini's recent collections. But there may actually have been a curious commonality in the fact that she was always inspired by musicians, and the clothes here also felt rooted in a subcultural music scene. It was as though someone had been paging through Rizzoli's recent tome devoted to the first 10 years ofAnother Manmagazine, with the likes of Bobby Gillespie fearlessly carrying on the legacy of Mick 'n' Keef, wearing their girlfriends' chiffon and crepe, effortlessly easing snake hips into skinny trousers. "Visceral storytelling through fashion" was the declared intent of this collection, and the visceral clearly lived in looks that will undoubtedly enflame anyone who carries a torch for Gucci's jet-set legacy—something which, to her credit, Giannini managed to adapt to her own devices during her eight years as creative director. Take your pick from the stock-tied blouse in red chiffon, the slinky gilded top in red lace, or theeensygoverness jacket with three-quarter sleeves. The shoes, one of the cornerstones of Gucci's accessories business, were pony sandals and mink-lined scuffs. The very deliberate sissiness seemed a glaringly obvious way to distance this collection from its immediate past.But how on earth could that become the launchpad for the label's next incarnation? Maybe there were clues in the qualities the show notes isolated as definitive of the new Gucci: nonconformist, romantic, intellectual. Some of the models sported berets, spectacles, and long, skinny scarves. There was a duffel coat in a dazzling red. Right proper existential. Was it enough? The women's show in a few weeks will undoubtedly provide more of an answer to that question. For now, Alessandro Michele, Gucci's head accessories designer, took a bow surrounded by his team.
It was a generous, democratic gesture, and it was as far from luxury's designer hauteur as those lank-tressed ephebes shuffling down the Gucci catwalk in their chiffon pussy bows.
19 January 2015
Now that Pantone has crowned Marsala as its chosen color for 2015, you need look no further than Gucci for proof of its desirability. The house's Pre-Fall collection was awash in a similar brick-red hue, cut here with a dusty blue. But that was not the only forecasting to emerge from the brand's Florence showroom today: If creative director Frida Giannini has her way, the '70s revival that is already upon us will last past next summer and into fall. Of course, that era marked a golden age for Gucci and has remained a constant reference point for the brand ever since. But just as one letter separatesreferentialfromreverential, small details can result in an entirely different collection. Here, the offering proved stylistically sharp (flats for evening!) and negligibly nostalgic. Flared pants jauntily cloaked the pointy-toe brogues, while knee-length, printed silk chemisier dresses felt attractively seasonless and ageless in equal measure.Those prints, as it happens, made a U-turn from the painterly Resort collection florals created by artist Kris Knight, who was enthusiastically feted by Giannini at Art Basel in Miami Beach last week. This latest crop veered geometric, the most notable featuring a lattice pattern arranged fluidly like an op art illusion around the body. Even a stacked leaf print, appealingly rendered in contrasting warm and cool tones, seemed more camo than botanical.Zoom out from these particulars and you find a collection that alternated between amped up and pared back. Clusters of crystals adorned distressed jeans, and studs followed the pattern of Nordic-inspired sweaters. Luxurious but understated leather and suede coats and daywear dresses, meanwhile, came unlined and unstructured; ditto a brushed double-face wool camel coat. Essentially, these were different sides of the same craftsmanship coin—it's just that the former appeals to the Gucci customer who buys for the statement (her best bet: the embellished Persian lamb cropped jacket with shaggy Mongolian trim), and the latter attracts the client who prioritizes staying power. This season, they might find common ground with a new bag: The boxy accordion construction—in shiny calfskin or python—hinged monogram closure, and double-chain straps were a throwback to the '70s, but the effect was still fresh.
10 December 2014
Kate Moss caused a mini-commotion in the front row at Gucci today. She stars in a fall campaign for the brand's new Jackie bag: In a case of advertising imitating life, the paparazzi chase her through an airport. Frida Giannini's terrific Spring collection caught some of Moss' rock-chick look in the way it mixed denim, kimono silks, and shaggy furs. The supermodel has always been a vintage shopper to beat the band, and Giannini often approaches her Gucci collections in a similar way, picking up the best bits of the past and giving them a contemporary spin. After last season's sharp swing through the '60s, today's show had more of an early-'70s thing going on. It looked like the love child of Jimi Hendrix and Ali MacGraw—glam with a touch of the good girl.The glam came through in the gold bullion embroidery of the bandleader jackets and the multicolor Mongolian lamb on boleros and vests (collectibles all). You caught glimpses of the good girl in the sailor-style jeans, a denim blue jumpsuit with contrasting yellow stitching, or a short-sleeve space-dye sweater worn with a neat, A-line suede skirt. Hair and makeup (from the new Gucci beauty range, launching with a party tonight) were both minimal, contributing to the innocent impression.What made these clothes better than a trip to the vintage store, of course, was the Gucci quality. A bottle green glove-leather shirtdress inset with broderie anglaise was undeniably precious, but it retained an easy, offhand quality that made it desirable. Same goes for the treasure that was the jacket pieced together from antique Japanese silks. Its patchwork pattern inspired the collection's print, which Giannini used for a shirtwaist dress and a pajama set, both equally relaxed. If the show relied a touch too much on jeans for a designer offering, that's a small detail. Giannini is at her believable best when she embraces everyday luxury. The good life, after all, is what the Gucci mythology is all about. This season she eschewed the usual parade of red carpet numbers for a trio of cocktail dresses in chinoiserie print silks trimmed with crystals. Couture workmanship with casual vibes—Kate could tell you, it's hard to resist a combo like that.
17 September 2014
According to Frida Giannini, the Gucci man wears two faces: sartorial jet-setter and free rock-and-roll spirit. She brought them together in the nautical theme of today's show. Above deck, her "decadent admirals," as she called them, gloried in precision tailoring, like the grosgrain-trimmed evening coat over a silk waistcoat and pants. The deckhands had to make do with paint-splashed denims, or a washed leather jacket paired with striped jeans. Not hard to see who was having more fun.Gucci's quintessential modness always had something of the military about it, at least as such an idea was translated by sixties swingers. A Little Drummer Boy jacket? Every mod home should have one. By pushing that notion into the naval zone, Giannini gave herself the chance to offer something fresh and bright, white and navy striped. She combined the precision of a uniform (laser cut for added sharpness) with something totally relaxed. The cross-body strap of a semi-duffel made like a military sash. What shirts there were were pajama-like, long and collarless. Otherwise, the models sported scoop-neck tees, little striped kerchiefs, and casually rolled sailor pants. "Mick on Mustique," Giannini volunteered. "Or Steven Tyler." In fact, this collection worked best in the moments when a hint of sensuality undercut all the navy-and-white crispness.
22 June 2014
Over the course of the last several months, Frida Giannini has endured persistent rumors that she would exit Gucci. The designer denied them publicly in May. At her Resort presentation today, she made her position clear in another way, partnering with the artist Kris Knight on a floral print featuring plants that have historically been used by women to seduce, command power over men, and otherwise provide protection. "I went beyond the flower box and picked botanicals that either blossomed at night, dawn, or dusk, but also chose plants that have strong roots for adaptability, persistence, and resistance in harsh environments," Knight said in a press release. Plenty of subtext to read into that if you're looking for it. Writ large, the print was very pretty, not unlike the Flora print with which Giannini made her name at Gucci in the mid-aughts. And the below-the-knee slip and chemisier dresses (with detachable collars) on which the print appeared were undeniably charming, among the best of the Resort season so far.Giannini is coming off a terrific Fall show, and some of the pieces here, including the pastel peacoats and stacked-heel loafer boots, are developments from that collection. She extended the marinière metaphor with a striped sequin sweater and extremely low-slung sailor pants in a variety of fabrics, from stonewashed denim to black leather. A chambray shirt and equally casual jean skirt with coral embroideries rounded out this strong offering. Giannini knows that ultimately the clothes must speak for themselves, and what they had to say here was plenty persuasive.
2 June 2014
Back to the sixties. Maybe it was all those old pictures of movie stars sporting Gucci inThe Director, a new documentary about her design process, that got Frida Giannini going about the brand's glory days. The film, produced by James Franco, was screened this January in Paris. Giannini has mined the house archives before, as recently, in fact, as her Spring 2013 ode to principessa glamour. Only this time, the look was Swinging London rather than Roman dolce vita. Think more Jean Shrimpton, less Marella Agnelli."I felt the need to materialize the essence of Gucci. A longing for precision [and] clean lines." Such was her stated aim, and that instinct made for a spirited outing, one of Giannini's best. She tapped into the casual side of Gucci's heritage (yes, those were honest to goodness blue jeans) and its tailoring smarts without sacrificing much of the house's trademark glam. Echoing her menswear show last month, the silhouette was fairly shrunken: Snug peacoats hugged pullovers and button-downs, and drainpipes tapered above the ankle, the better to show off the cool shoes, a horsebit loafer hybridized with a Chelsea boot. Sleeveless dresses with sharp, above-the-knee hems had a youthful efficiency. But London's dolly birds never had it this good. Those A-line dresses came in soft napa leather in poppy pastels—baby blue, sage green, and a mustardy yellow—or animal-spot pony hair. And was there ever fur—curly teddy bear shearling, goat hair, beaver, mink—only rendered in shapes (a sweatshirt, for example) that downplayed the luxury factor.For evening, Giannini eschewed gowns in favor of mod minidresses and knee-high boots. But if the shapes were simple, the smoky crystal discs embellishing a neckline or the panels of a pleated skirt were not. The starlet set will fight over the yellow long-sleeve number with its black leather collar and bib of crystals. In that sense, Giannini and Gucci came full circle this season.
18 February 2014
There's something of sixties London in the pipeline right now, which probably means David Bailey is about to have another moment. Frida Giannini caught an early whiff of it with her latest collection of menswear for Gucci. Bailey's classic portraits of the era have always helped nourish Giannini's fantasies of London. There and then, London's la dolce vita was mod. Here and now, on the Gucci catwalk, mod was embodied again by skinny, speedy boys in turtlenecks and drainpipes paired with hyper-tailored bum-freezers and shrunken peacoats, and topped off with the sort of fisherman's cap John Lennon once favored. In fact, the cap-peacoat-and-black-leather-pants combo felt a little like something the Beatles would have worn in their Hamburg days.But this was no mere retro-vision on Giannini's part. Neoprene bonding mutated classics. The monochrome of mod was alleviated by creamy pastels lifted from the palette of rising young Canadian art star Kris Knight. They added a subtle energy, particularly in leather, to pieces like the powder-pink blazer and the pale blue military shirt. If the artificiality made you think of sugary pop, it also had a slightly fetishistic kink (maybe that's a bullet a leather shirt will never really be able to dodge).Back at the beginning of her reign at Gucci, Giannini showed a men's collection that was fizzing with the fun of theragazzion Rome's Via Veneto in its dolce heyday. Today's outing may have been darker in tone—King Krule (neu-Morrissey) and Smiths (alt-Morrissey) on the soundtrack—but it was a reminder that Giannini still knows where the boys are.
12 January 2014
To best understand Frida Giannini's approach to her Gucci Pre-Fall collection, it helps to look down. There, you will either find a towering 108-mm platform ankle bootie or the iconic Gucci horse-bit loafer, which celebrated its sixtieth anniversary this year. What might seem like a binary proposition—blue-blood flat versus hyper-glamorous heel—is really just Giannini exploring the Janus aspect of the Gucci woman: that is, looking back and looking ahead.The official line is that the collection represents the "Gucci essentials," the elements of which include sharp hues (fuchsia, brick, bumblebee, azure), controlled volume, amped-up outerwear, and a masculine-feminine mix. Giannini collided colors so close on the spectrum that they produced a new twist on monochromatic. At times, she emphasized layering. But then she showed a day-to-night dress with generous sleeves offset by a butterfly-shaped basque—as complete a look as it gets. Twice she hybridized the classic Perfecto: elongating it into a dress coat and covering it in extra-plush gray shearling. Bookmark both now.Zoom out to take the collection in full, and it's clear that Gucci's signature sex appeal has been outdone by sleek sportswear this season. It's as if Giannini is saying that luxe fabrications—a leather shirt as thin as rice paper and a chubby in goat and Mongolian lamb fur—should not be dismissed as impractical. Ditto the deerskin cap, which adds a finishing street-chic touch to the majority of looks. Notably, Giannini has also revived the embossed Diamante pattern, applying it to the entire range of bags. It dates back to the thirties, making it one of the brand's oldest codes. It is subtler than the GG monogram and, essentially, bridges past and future.
7 December 2013
A season ago, Frida Giannini was pregnant and sending nipped-waist skirt suits and second-skin python dresses down the Gucci runway. There would be no slinking into one of those for her. Today, she took the label's Spring collection in a sporty new direction, with mesh T-shirts, basketball shorts, track pants, and exposed triangle bras. Post-baby, Giannini spent the summer working out. "I wanted to come back with my abs," she said backstage.Well, it never hurts to design what you know. The show had a cool attitude, freer in silhouette and spirit than recent outings. It also keyed into what's happening on the street with the elevation of athletic clothes. There weren't sport sandals here, like we saw at Marc Jacobs last week—flats would be a step too far chez Gucci. Nonetheless, this was interesting new territory for Giannini, and, when you think about it, maybe not such a stretch for a house long known as a purveyor of equestrian gear.Of course, this being Gucci, the collection was also undeniably luxe. That mesh T-shirt? Laser-cut suede. Another oversize tee came in tooled leather. As a counterpoint to the sports references, Giannini looked at the Art Nouveau illustrations of Erté, and the large-scale scrolling flowers, in silk jacquards or Lurex, decorating most of the pieces nearly glowed. Meanwhile, she borrowed the cut and drape of Japanese kimonos for jackets and robe coats. The show's signature look, worn by Bette Franke, married a see-through tee, triangle bra, and track pants with a kimono-sleeve cardigan in an Erté floral.Morning workouts or no, Giannini's Gucci will always have a decadent streak. Not all of her glam sport ideas translated as well as Franke's—a green Lurex dress held together by bows at the sides, for example, wouldn't last the night on a dance floor, and other times all the crisscrossing straps started to muddle the seductive picture she was going for. Still, it's nice to see the designer loosen up.
17 September 2013
Motherhood has transformed Frida Giannini. She glowed when she took her bow today. And she looked _taller._The first outfit on the catwalk—a floral print tee, matching leggings, and a backpack—sent a message mixed enough to suggest that Gucci itself had taken an equally transformative turn: younger, clubbier, more athletic. First impressions are usually quite accurate. The collection that followed was a new direction for the label.With new life in her household, Giannini unsurprisingly claimed she was hungry for something more dynamic. T-shirts replaced shirts; a shirt jacket was the casual alternative for a blazer. Gucci's horsey heritage echoed in riding pants hybridized into ribbed-cuff trackies. And fabrics turned tech. "It's impossible," said the fabric people when Giannini came to them with her ideas for spring. All those techno materials seemed the antithesis of the artisanal intricacy that the designer has so artfully exercised for the brand over the past few years. But she eventually got all the bonding and lasering she wanted. Context was critical: The result was probably more striking because it came from a company whose reputation is scarcely based on high-performance outerwear. But the sleek gloss of a bonded jacket in olive green leather made an appropriate top for a T-shirt and a pair of those track pants. Even better: the tan blouson with the citron lining, and the anorak in a deep lilac.Daft Punk's new album was on the soundtrack—real instruments called into the service of synthetic sounds—and that sparked an inevitable comparison with Giannini's collection, where technology had been bent to a strikingly streamlined physicality. Where once she would have toyed with jet-set decadence, she was now endorsing health and fitness. Ah, the power of motherhood.There was another interesting comparison to be made. The other big story in the collection was the complex, slightly gothic floral print. Pair that with the techy sportswear and you've got yourself a telling parallel with Kim Jones' last collection for Louis Vuitton, where the Chapman Brothers contributed a twisted botanical print. Attention must be paid when two of the world's biggest luxury labels take such a quirky tack on the demands of the rapidly evolving global menswear market.
23 June 2013
Gucci's creative director, Frida Giannini, and Patrizio di Marco, the company's president and CEO, welcomed the birth of their daughter, Greta, back in March. This did not seem to have influenced the Resort collection Giannini showed by appointment this week—until you started noticing that, cumulatively, there was a more relaxed sensibility in effect. Oversized tunics were paired up with wide-legged trousers and lightweight cashmere coats tied up like nightgowns.If anything, the focus this time around was on rarefied materials applied to an essential travel checklist; what could be cozier than a hoodie in woven mink? And don't leave home without your woven Lurex kimono gown, crystal-embroidered pajama set, or metallic laminated leather trench. The shimmer balanced out the slouch, but it ultimately functioned as a design sleight of hand; the real decadence was in the sense of undone-ness.Giannini riffed on a wide range of references. It was easy enough to detect a Rio de Janeiro sunset in the hand-embroidered iridescent sequins, and day dresses printed with parasols, beach balls, and hearts looked like Jerry Hall 2.0. The horse bits were back on shoulder bags and stilettos alike; such house codes are as integral to the brand image as the glam sequin-embroidered dresses.While there were few weak links in this generally confident collection, the jogging outfit in jumbo paisley was a less successful athletic upgrade than the warm-up jacket in ocher perforated suede. And what to make of the short-sleeve sweatshirt that read, "Stardust is a glittering superstar" in tiny studs? This was either a lost-in-translation expression or an obscure Bowie shout-out. (Gucci is currently sponsoring theDavid Bowie Isexhibition at London's V&A Museum.) Much clearer was the version emblazoned with "Frida's"—the first time Giannini's name has appeared on any item since she arrived at the house in 2005. Now more than ever, this is Mamma Frida's moment.
26 May 2013
For Spring, Frida Giannini went all in with color: azalea pink, fuchsia, and a Riviera blue that conjured sun-soaked images of the Italian jet set circa the seventies. Clearly, the Gucci designer prefers the dark side, because she's back in black for Fall, name-checking Allen Jones, the British Pop artist with the kinky streak, and juxtaposing, as her program notes put it, "a demure, couture-inspired silhouette with a subversive undertone." She may be a couple weeks shy of giving birth to her first baby, but she isn't oblivious to the power of sex, that's for sure.Because, in the end, this collection will never quite qualify as demure. How could it, with all the shiny black python she used for little numbers like a fitted skirtsuit with a slit up to there in back or a second-skin dress? Body-con and sexy, the python pieces were hands down the strongest thing about the show. The forties by way of the seventies is a look that's gaining traction this season, and the cabans, the peplum jackets, and the hourglass dresses with exaggerated hips here put Gucci in the middle of that dialogue. But some of Giannini's tailleurs in bulky astrakhan or pony hair seemed stiff, and too much of the past. It was a feeling that the fetish-y accessories—fishnets, gloves, patent oxford booties—didn't quite dispel, although the black leather and snakeskin turtlenecks she layered underneath many of the pieces added a modernizing element. Long-sleeve silk sheaths, some with bib insets of delicate black lace mesh, were in her sweet spot. The softer, suppler fabrics made a difference. At the other end of the spectrum, a boxy powder blue men's coat with a deep lapel and a fur collar had its fans.The stretch lace mesh carried over to her evening looks—silk cocktail dresses, gowns, and jumpsuits with peekaboo bodices exuberantly embroidered in winglike patterns with sequins, paillettes, feathers, and silk fringe. Kasia Struss' knee-length cocktail number, in particular, looked like a decadent night out. Once baby comes, Giannini can do some vicarious partying when she sees them on the red carpet circuit.
19 February 2013
For all its trimly tailored, classically fabric-ed, soberly toned salute to tradition, Frida Giannini's latest collection for men was missing one critical component of the gentleman's wardrobe: the necktie. Not a one on the Gucci catwalk, not counting the bow ties at night (but they're something else). Instead, Giannini paired her herringbones, houndstooths, and flannels with mohair sweaters, or knit polos open at the neck. It was one of the most seductive expressions of the casual flourish with which Milanese designers have attempted to defuse their stampede to formality and tradition this week. And, even when the neck was restrained (a bow tie at night remains an inviolable principle of nocturnal elegance), Giannini delivered the accompanying "tuxedo" in tweed.Given that the collection was shaped around sartorial disciplines as strict as military tailoring and its Savile Row progeny, Giannini managed to shake some dandy monkeys out of the trees. Black and charcoal gray were the somber canvas against which she threw a jacket in blazing red tweed, or a suit, rather more subtle but still shot with color, in a tweedy houndstooth, or a peacoat in an appropriate pea green. The military academies ofMitteleuropäischemyth have provided her with some of her finest moments in the past, and they didn't let her down today, with cadets' jackets in powder blue and winter white, and voluminous officers' coats that were well in tune with Milan's big-is-best message this season. The footwear also took a subtle cue from the solidity of a soldier's shoe.It wasn't just tie-less ease that set Giannini apart from her peers. Yes, there were dark shadows in her show, but there was also a thread of almost cartoonish color running through the whole thing. Even more so in fuzzy mohair. The interplay of proper and playful made this collection one of the designer's best menswear shows to date.
13 January 2013
Maybe it's the fact that she's expecting her first baby this March, maybe not, but there was a ladylike, not quite demure, quality to Frida Giannini's pre-fall collection for Gucci. A chunky striped turtleneck and full skirt evoked her beloved 1970s, but otherwise the clothes seemed mostly to channel the fifties, what with the hourglass silhouettes of dresses, the neat and trim tweed skirtsuits, the off-the-shoulder tops perched above slim pencil skirts, and the coats with their sculpted, couture-ish shapes.Not unlike at her men's show earlier this week, color played a major role; and animal print, which has emerged as one of the season's strongest trends, was also key. A halterneck gown in jaguar-print chiffon offered a taste of the after-dark drama the designer usually showcases on the runway, which made it stand out. Conservative isn't the right word for this collection, controlled is. It felt new for Giannini, and it clicked.
16 December 2012
Paging Marella Agnelli and Marisa Berenson. At Gucci today, Frida Giannini conjured their glory days (and those of early Italian ready-to-wear), as seen through the lenses of photographers like Richard Avedon and Gian Paolo Barbieri. As night-and-day different from her brooding Fall outing as could be, the show opened up-up-upbeat, with a narrow tunic belted over full trousers in azalea pink. It set a late-sixties/early-seventies vibe and a feel-good mood that the designer called "aristographic." Aristo Charlotte Casiraghi took it all in from the front row."I love to play with color for Spring," Giannini said backstage, and play she did. In addition to that bright pink, there was cobalt, citrus yellow, coral, and turquoise, each one as vibrant as the next and worn head-to-quite-literally-toe with sunglasses, bags, and shoes matched to outfits. It wasn't subtle, but subtlety, at least in terms of palette, wasn't the designer's game this season. Plastic necklaces and earrings were designed to look, as she put it, "like fake Liz Taylor."Still, color was only part of the message. Silhouette was a big story. Tunic and trouser combinations have been getting major play lately, and Giannini is positioning herself as a serious proponent for Spring. She believes in ruffles—tracing the single sleeve of a column dress, arcing around the shoulders and down the back of another, adding major drama to an otherwise quite minimal V-neck gown. Cutouts also played a starring role, upping the provocation factor and giving these polished clothes a modern update. Giannini looked east for the collection's prints but not in any obvious way. A karung motif was stamped on a crisp Japanese paper fabric and the floral was inspired by Japanese wallpaper.For evening, the designer opted to show only black and white. It made for a strong endnote, especially in the cases of a stunning long white dress with coral jewels embroidering the neckline and another in black with ruffles outlining a completely bare back. The international jet set looks different now than it did in Agnelli and Berenson's heyday. As Europe continues to struggle, new economies flourish—witness the top clients Gucci flew in from around the globe for this runway show. Still, sophisticated looks like those two dresses cross all borders. Perhaps now more than ever, we all yearn for a slice of the good life, don't we?
18 September 2012
The Gucci archive unfolds like a lotus for Frida Giannini. Obviously, she was aware of thebaiaderastripes that evoke a heady period in the label's history, but a recent auction produced a bag in a color combination that she'd never seen before, and that set her imagination winging away to Pantone Land. Clement Chabernaud opened the show in a leaf green suit and closed it in a silky matte black tux, and those two poles encompassed a "chromatic rush," as the show notes so accurately described it. If the rush peaked in a blaze of crimson and orange (particularly a double-breasted jacket in raffia and a half-belted canvas coat that had the color intensity that comes from overdyeing), it smoothed into a pleasurable buzz of blues that brought to mind a Mediterranean summer. Which was exactly what Giannini intended. When she showed white patent jackets, she imagined them gracing a yacht.The razor-sharp precision of her vision means that the Gucci ideal ofla dolce vitais never far away. And the spirit of its global ambassador Marcello Mastroianni hung over the trim jackets, the tapered, cuffed, slightly cropped pants, the knit polos, and the white worn with everything. The deal was sealed with classic Gucci snaffle bit loafers, enjoying their 60th anniversary this year. The consummate polish and lightness of this collection made an interesting contrast with one of Giannini's earlier expeditions down the Via Veneto for Spring 2007. You want to know how far she's come? Look no further.
24 June 2012
Seven years ago this summer, Frida Giannini made her Gucci debut with her Flora print accessory range. She was in New York then to show it off, and she was back today, presenting a new Resort collection that reinterprets the Flora print (originally lifted from a fifties Gucci scarf made for Grace Kelly) in a new way. It was a nice full-circle moment.Giannini has been on a roll lately, and the new lineup is a worthy successor to the hit she had on her hands in February. There were echoes of the Milan show here in a leopard-motif silk jacquard pajama set and a shirtwaist dress with a seventies feel. Pantsuits in denim blue and lavender with elongated jackets and low-slung, skinny flares also riffed on that decade.Color is one of Giannini's big messages for Resort. In addition to those suits, she cut sixties-ish A-line shifts and long narrow evening numbers in solid shades of yellow, turquoise green, and raspberry. All of them were finished off with elaborate jeweled embellishments at the neckline that rendered actual necklaces superfluous.The real star of the collection, though, was the Flora print. Like its designer, it's grown up some. Giannini called it "unfinished," pointing out the black and white flowers set in between and behind the colored-in ones. The floral motif turned up on everything from a white linen peacoat to the hem of a strapless silk jersey dress, but it was freshest on a belted dress in a blue and white stripe borrowed from a man's dress shirt.
6 June 2012
Frida Giannini said she had nineteenth-century decadents on her mind when she was designing Fall. The mood, not unlike at her men's show last month, was dark—with rich tapestry jacquards, plush velvets, a hothouse floral printed on a ground of black, and a palette that revolved around plum, bottle green, espresso, and jet. Romantic was the word she used backstage, "but not cute-romantic; it has a confidence," she said. Nocturnal is another good word for the collection, which delivered more capital F fashion than we're used to here, while also feeling more personal than previous Giannini outings—pour us a glass of absinthe.To begin with, the confidence came through in the emphasis on menswear, much of it oversized. Giannini opened with a military jacket paired with a slim, long velvet skirt, and there was a great-looking cropped leather peacoat with an away-from-the-body swagger. Capes figured prominently, too, complemented by full-leg pants with a real slouch that felt new for Gucci. They were stuffed into crocodile riding boots—Arthur Rimbaud never had it so good.As for the romance, it had an edge that went beyond theScarfacesoundtrack playing in the background. Blouses were provocatively sheer, with Pre-Raphaelite sleeves and artfully placed scrolls of silk or velvet on the bodice. Dresses, for the most part, cleaved the lines of the body, but when they didn't, as with the pair in vibrant leopard jacquard, they dipped to the midriff, with slits inching up the thigh. One dress, covered neckline-to-hem in oil-slick coq feathers, looked almost wicked.The show crescendoed with a series of dramatic peekaboo gowns in jewel-embellished tulle that seemed to reveal more than they actually did. Siren gowns all, they were the literal crystallization of Giannini's dark glamour theme.
21 February 2012
Frida Giannini is a true connoisseur of doomed male beauties. No, it's not the James Franco connection, it's her name-check of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as decadent teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud inTotal Eclipsethat is the giveaway this season. Hands up to who saw that film. Well,shedid, and it made enough of an impression that it emerged on today's Gucci catwalk as an inspiration. Looking at his track record, you might say the Gucci man has always tended toward the pleasure-seeking end of the spectrum, but Giannini nudged his appetites into more shadowy territory with her new collection. She mentioned Helmut Berger, the actor whose profligate lifestyle defined a whole breed of proto-celebrity hog in the seventies as a reference point, and with him came a wave of Mitteleuropa flourishes: riding boots and equestrian trousers from a Viennese riding academy; dark,fin-de-sièclefloral prints; tapestry travelling bags; silken tie prints used as the starting point for rich jacquards.Giannini also employs the words "Visconti grunge" to convey the idea of something elaborately decorative but young and urgent. The tailored silhouette was whippet-thin, but over that she'd layer an oversize coat or a chunky cardigan, like the teen Rimbaud wearing his much older lover's clothes. The subtle excess of the collection came to a head with an evening finale of dévoré-ed velvets, laser-cut ponyskin, and a jacket threaded with black Lurex in a design that suggested seeping oil. It was alluringly outré—and that's a quality that can't go undenied in the face of Milan menswear's tame restraint.
15 January 2012
Frida Giannini has gotten a lot of celebrity mileage out of her ode to the Jazz Age. Just last night, Emma Stone took home a People's Choice Award in a cropped green tux and fitted black pants from Gucci's Spring collection. The designer's follow-up for pre-fall is a good deal more subdued, almost minimal at times. A pansy print has replaced black and gold bugle beads, and the silhouette has been significantly loosened up. We can't remember seeing a boxy knit turtleneck or a maxi skirt from Giannini before. Oversize coats looked new, too, but they're in keeping with the overall direction of the season. Same goes for the collection's equestrian undercurrent. Plenty of designers are feeling horsey for pre-fall, but few can claim a riding heritage like Gucci's. The furs should find plenty of fans, especially a natural fox jacket inlaid with a black and white chevron design—nothing minimalist about that.
11 January 2012
Gucci is celebrating its 90th birthday in Florence next week with a blowout that will mark the opening of the new Gucci Museo there. The Italian house was born in 1921, but backstage, designer Frida Giannini insisted that the Art Deco motifs she showed off on the runway today were pure coincidence. "I like the architectural shapes, especially the New York skyscrapers of the period," she said. Chance or not, Giannini's Chrysler building flapper numbers put her at the forefront of Spring's Jazz Age revival. New York designers beat her to the 1920's theme last week, but the graphic quality of the black, white, and bronze color-blockings and embroideries gave her dresses an anti-retro appeal. They'll have legs on the red carpet and, you imagine, in real life, too, where their short lengths and streamlined, away-from-the-body shapes will make them go-to favorites come party time.On the tailoring side, Giannini hewed to fairly androgynous lines. Jackets were short and boxy and topped high-waisted pants with front pleats or deep tuxedo stripes down the sides. If there was nothing twenties-ish about the silhouettes, the era informed the jackets' geometric designs and their Deco buttons and fastenings. The pieces that resonated were the ones that put Gucci's leather experts to the test, like a black and gold leather shift dress laser-cut so minutely that it resembled eyelash fringe, or a fitted T-shirt stitched together from strips of python to look like zebra stripes. The equestrian scarf print on a pair of trousers and the hem of a drop-waist skirt also stood out. Elsewhere, mismatched prints got too complicated, and a sidetrack into harem pants would have been better avoided. Still, the evening clothes in particular will ensure that Gucci's 91st year, like so many before it, is a success.
20 September 2011
Frida Giannini's faith in male vanity produced one of her strongest men's collections to date, its inspiration the British gentleman's club, a monument to said vanity. Except Frida's club was populated not by fusty old lords but by thin white dukes, narcissistic pop aristos like Robert Pattinson. And she gave them the perfect wardrobe, just the right mix of reassuring classic and casual edge.The most classic elements were the jackets—sharply tailored in houndstooth, pied-de-poule, and Prince of Wales checks, and paired with slim black trousers that snapped at the ankle. That last detail spoke volumes.Giannini has fine-tuned the all-important Gucci attitude. It's dressy without being demanding. As sartorial as those blazers were, they were shown with collarless shirts or worn without ties. And as slim as the dominant silhouette was, Giannini balanced it with a three-pleated pant and generous knits.But the real stars of this collection were the skins—in tones from ice-pale to aubergine—and the outerwear. Giannini remodeled waterproofs as a safari jacket, a Prince of Wales raincoat, and a black-trimmed trench in a brick red shade. She used the thermosealing that is usually inside a mackintosh as a graphic element on the outside of a micro-checked parka or a color-blocked caban.If there was something mod about that, it carried over into Giannini's monochrome eveningwear. A grosgrain jacket paired with black-and-white plaid pants in sheeny silk faille would be the ideal after-dark garb for a sleek young creature of the night.
19 June 2011
Frida Giannini checked off a lot of current trends with her Resort collection. She had the acid brights: Yellow shorts were paired with a blush-colored python motorcycle jacket and a trompe l'oeil dress combined that same shade of chartreuse with nude and black. She had the mixed, clashing prints: A black and white tropical-pattern top came tucked into purple and white paisley drawstring pants. And she did her own take on nautical, with red, white, and black (rather than navy) separates.The show notes explained that Giannini looked to photos from Gucci's archives dating to the fifties and sixties, but she treaded lightly. Her Fall show, for example, felt much more strongly influenced by the seventies than these clothes did by her new decades of reference. In fact, it doesn't get much more modern than Giannini's relaxed take on the cocktail suit, with its white jacket, gold T-shirt, and silky black drawstring pants. The evening pieces were the most compelling here. A long white and black dress with a gold-dipped bloom at the neckline was another standout.
13 June 2011
Before Gucci's 90th anniversary show today, Frida Giannini cited a pair of influences: Anjelica Huston, as lensed by the photographer Bob Richardson, and Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine. That first reference point meant we were back in the 1970's again. Giannini's girls have traded in last season's harem pants, macramé moto jackets, and lean jumpsuits for culottes, pussy-bow blouses topped by snug sweater vests or velvet blazers, and shirtwaist dresses. Many of them wore fedoras with feathers in the brim, and some sported both a shoulder bag (an elongated version of the Jackie) and a mini top-handle frame bag. If that sounds like Giannini had pared down the glamour quotient, think again. There was fur and python and patent leather galore. The lattermost came in a sexy-as-all-get-out slim black pencil skirt worn with a silver fox chubby. What was most notable about the furs and pythons was their eye-opening colors, and the designer gave full rein to her penchant for mixing unexpected hues together in one outfit: Take the ocher coat with Mongolian lamb trim worn with a scarlet blouse and a bordeaux hat, or the amber python jacket with rust-colored fur collar that topped a lavender shirt and violet cardigan.For evening, Giannini went long, cutting draped gowns in as much as 35 meters of chiffon. Don't think for an instant, though, that these were covered up. On the contrary, they dipped down to the navel and came slit up to the hips. Sure, there was a long-sleeved version, but it was as sheer as the others; the model's matching briefs were on full view. Here, the designer skipped the fur in favor of shrugs or scarves or jackets whipped up from hand-dyed silk flowers.Backstage, Giannini said the long dresses were the Florence Welch part of the equation, explaining that she could picture the chanteuse rocking one of them on stage. But they wouldn't have looked out of place on Anjelica circa 1970-something, either. The seventies are understandably dear to both the Gucci brand and its creative director, though coming off a Spring season where so many designers were indebted to the decade, that meant this collection lacked the shock of the new. Still, you can't fault the luxe factor of today's show or the fact that there was so much wantable, wearable fashion on the runway, that fab patent skirt not least of all.
22 February 2011
2011 isGucci's 90th anniversary, and Frida Giannini's men's show for Fall was the start of the celebration. There had already been intimations of Giannini's approach to the birthday year in her pre-fall collection for women, where she locked into a killer-chic, early seventies vibe with just a hint of rock-starsauvage, and here it was again today. The cornerstone of the collection was a lean two-button suit, its trouser flaring slightly over the shoe. With Faces-era Rod Stewart croaking over the sound system, the connection with a vintage Gucci moment was inescapable.But Giannini has found her strength in that connection. Streamlined luxe for the Ur-jet set was Gucci's original calling card, and the designer laid on a master class in subtle opulence, from the opening trench in ostrich through the double-breasted croc blazer to an astrakhan sweater for evening. Funny thing though—as excessive as that menagerie may sound, it played as quite easy, even restrained, due to the muted colors and casual attitude. Time has taught Giannini how to bring a light touch to the legacy, how to integrate her own experience (the snappy dressers of her girlhood rock dreams) with the demands of a long-established house like Gucci. And when one model strode down the catwalk in a shaggy swath of Mongolian lamb, the two worlds collided beautifully.
16 January 2011
If Frida Giannini's Spring show saw her embracing the hard-edged glamour of the late seventies, pre-fall took her back to the start of that decade. Once upon a time, Giannini designed a women's collection forGuccithat was inspired by Ziggy Stardust. Here it was possible to detect intimations of David Bowie just before his glittery watershed: theHunky Doryvoluminous pants with the deep box pleat, for instance, and theSpace OddityMongolian lamb that fizzed around collars and cuffs. Those flared pants and a pair of gray flannel culottes aside, the silhouette was seventies-lean, elongated even more by ribbed ponchos that zipped snugly round the torso (the best had a dramatic fringe).The collection echoed London at the dawn of that decade. Short skirts and turtlenecks were topped by long, military-influenced coats and paired with above-the-knee boots with chunky heels and square toes, the whole energetic ensemble a vision of casual dolly-bird-on-the-go chic. Other early-seventies details included the chemisiers, especially one in a tiger print; the muted accents of cherry, chartreuse, aqua, and rust (a distinct contrast to Spring's ka-pow colors); the big peaked lapels on skinny velvet pantsuits; the floppy hats and fur caps; and even the dash of corduroy. For evening, Giannini offered cocktail dresses in black crepe and gowns in black jersey, both anchored with studded metalwork that bordered on thesauvage. The shagginess of the lamb called to Everywoman's Inner Barbarian (especially when Giannini made it as easy as zipping on a pair of shaggy armlets or slipping into a shrug), and the designer amplified the appeal with double-faced silver fox, layered in panels on jackets cut from astrakhan knitted into a particularly lush bouclé. Weightless, luxuriant, they felt like bare essentials for a twenty-first-century wild child.
13 January 2011
Anybody who expected a quiet, classic collection of neutrals in the vein of Frida Giannini's Fall show got a jolt when the first model walked out in an orange blazer, violet tube top, green pants, and gold python belt, her hair slicked and her lips a glossy red. Glamour is back at Gucci, and it looked right at home. "I pushed the accelerator on the provocation," the designer said afterward, crediting the late-seventies photographs of Guy Bourdin, David Bailey, and Chris von Wangenheim for the bold color palette. The program notes added Marakkech to her list of inspirations, which inevitably meant that Yves Saint Laurent was in the air as well.Whether it was color-blocking or Berber accents, the fab factor was dialed way, way up. A dip-to-the-navel turquoise, jade, and black jumpsuit was as louche as they come; likewise, the asymmetrical wrapped bodices of vibrant dresses that exposed flashes of bare midriff and rib. Giannini's girls wore a safari jacket in softest suede, a fitted linen riding jacket heavily embroidered and studded around the armholes, or a T-shirt cover-up in openwork crochet—nothing plain Jane about these glamazons. Leathers were densely laced and dotted with gold hardware or fringed to the hilt (a bona fide Spring trend that began at Tom Ford, as you might recall had he not been so stingy with his collection photos). Below the waist at Gucci? Leather drop-crotch harem pants, naturally, and spiky sandals that showed off a red pedicure to match the models' lips.Evening was similarly split: a trio of genie jumpsuits in what looked like black silk jersey with gold accents on the one hand, and on the other, jewel-tone, vaguely tribal get-your-party-on dresses. These were so ornately embellished with metal, feathers, and beads that they shimmered like candy wrappers. In other words, girls looking to get in on Spring's 1970's action (and there's a lot out there—holla, Marc Jacobs!) will find options to spare from Giannini.
21 September 2010
Gucci designer Frida Giannini is very taken with all those iconic sixties bohos, the louche-living set that was headed up by the Rolling Stones and the Gettys—Talitha and John Paul, Jr., the latter of which she name-checked in the notes for her latest men's show.Fact is, once you stripped him of his caftan and ethnic doodads, JPG Jr. was pretty much like any other wannabe sixties groover in his skinny suit and foulard. And that Nothing Special quality was unfortunately what his presence bestowed on this Gucci collection. When she took over at the house, Giannini was regularly lambasted for the flash and trash of her work, but that Roman vulgarity brought something spicy and new to the Gucci table. As she has grown up and into the job, that's been sidelined by an increasingly respectful trawl through the archives.What Giannini is doing is too rich to be bland, but it has definitely lost some of its flavor. Today's show was a perfect capsule of Gucci jet-set emblems: the sheen-y silk/mohair suit, the chocolate brown safari suit, the rawhide leather jacket, the suede-fronted cardigan, the Indian-embroidered denim shirt, the silk jacquard evening jacket. Giannini moved onto this haute bourgeois turf last season, but as much as she loaded up on the camel coats then, she'd also insert a wingy jacket in midnight blue ponyskin or ocelot print. The equivalent this time around was the silk jacket with the tone-on-tone horse bit-and-stirrup design, an entirely sober tip of the cap to the house heritage.Intriguingly, the most compelling section was a group in natural organic cotton—a safari suit, a peacoat, jean jacket, biker jacket. It had the same ghostly presence as undyed denim, and it felt like the most modern stuff on the catwalk. The fact that Giannini could put it there, in amidst her JPG Jr. memorial gear, means you still have to watch this girl.
20 June 2010
"Stylish travel" was the stated theme of Frida Giannini's latest collection, though it could be argued that the concept has been part and parcel of Gucci since its inception. Working with a neutral palette of khaki, rust, and army green for day, the designer turned out a waxed cotton trench, sporty silk jumpsuit with elastic waist, and whisper-thin leather biker jacket. There was a bit of military and a lot of urban cool in the look, which reflected the simplified, back-to-brand-basics approach Giannini has been taking of late. A series of saddle-printed silks smartly nodded to Gucci's rich heritage, as did a chain-strap purse with gold logo based on a design from the seventies. The freshest evening looks, not surprisingly, were in that very of-the-moment color, blush: a short beaded number with open sides and a stunning silk wrap gown with silver beaded trim.Buon viaggio, indeed.
16 June 2010
"I've grown up. It's more mature clothes for more mature women, because that's what I am," Frida Giannini said after her show. She's only 38, and hardly middle-aged, but this season Giannini's designing seems to be hitting the kind of equilibrium Stella McCartney reached a couple of years back: the confidence to relax and not try too hard to be super-duper fashion-y. Things began with a calm opening exit of cream, dove gray, and barely there top-to-toe color—a couple of fitted dresses, a slim patchworked ostrich and suede coat shown with matching opaque tights and shoes. With that, Giannini deleted the expectation that this was to be a frenetic seasonal Gucci trend-grab. It was more about consolidating her look: the pants she's always been good at tailoring, put together with coats and fur-patched jackets with a believably glamorous daywear attitude.Giannini quoted the nineties and the sixties in her program notes. Inescapably, that brings up Tom Ford, but the reference only really applied to the early boot-cut pants and GG logo phase of his career, when he himself was reanimating Gucci's earlier history as a manufacturer of sporty Italian separates. Giannini's pants, narrow and fluted just enough to fit over the shoe, looked proportionally right. They were flatteringly tailored over the backside (these things are crucial, after all) and great when paired with an A-line suede coat with a fox vest liner, or her several versions of cropped mélanged fur jackets.When she showed dresses, Giannini ditched ultrashort for a slightly longer length, with leg-fitting suede thigh boots reaching up to the hemline—a way to be sexy without too much tarty-ness. All that, done within a pale palette of neutrals, meant she essentially had a new, quite refreshing look done and dusted. The Gucci finale parade of eveningwear—all short black dresses intercut with snake-patterned lace and ostrich—seemed more like going through the motions of a requisite brand ritual to keep up red-carpet business. That's part of the job description here, of course. But with this collection, Giannini's far more important achievement was to restore the idea that Gucci ready-to-wear might have a viable life in daylight.
26 February 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
17 January 2010
Like so many others this season, Frida Giannini opened her show with white—a taut, multi-strapped dress that put Gucci on a glam, athletic, almost sci-fi path that she kept to with energy and conviction. It was a modernist streak she's avoided in the past, preferring to take her girl into the realms of hippie and disco, but the change of direction gave the show a turbo-charged shot of adrenaline, ranking it as the best Giannini has done yet.The program notes said she had started off thinking about a little black dress, but for some reason that didn't appear until the midsection. What came first was actually better: jackets and high-waisted stretch leggings, inset with sections of sports mesh and lashed through the torso and outside leg with crisscross lacings of rubber piping, bristling with silver hardware. Motocross and minimized parachute jackets and crocodile bikers all came out—the sort of thing a Gucci girl loves. As it developed, Giannini stepped it up, laying on more harnesses, opening the backs of blazers to reveal bare skin, adding more metal, more sparkle—the kind of Gucci-glamour sensationalism that had somehow slipped out the door in the past few years.Midway came a drop in speed when the show took a detour around ikat print—an odd thing to add, and probably a hedge against losing the customer who has gone for the folkloric side of Gucci recently. Still, Giannini got back on track when the color disappeared and the pattern of the ikat was transformed into silvery needle-sharp embroidery on short black body-dresses. At the end came a robot-woman dress that was totally encased in a tubular web of metallic and crystal beading—as rock-star performance-ready as anything that's been shown so far this season. It had absolutely nothing to do with the drifty, bucolic, romantic themes that are wafting up and down other runways, but you could see exactly who'll want it.
25 September 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
20 June 2009
If the Gucci girl was a creature of the night on the Fall runway, she's ready to soak up the sun for Resort. A teeny-weeny, scuba-inspired dress would be perfect for Ibiza, just as tomboyish seersucker pants paired with a chambray shirt and a jacket—be it a traditional blazer, oversize washed leather topper, or neat raincoat—are just right for the Amalfi coast. Said Italian playground was designer Frida Giannini's touchstone, but a mosaic print and embroidery were the most direct references to her stated inspiration. That's as it should be; there's no need to belabor the point. These are uncomplicated, go-anywhere clothes for a woman who likes to travel in style.
14 June 2009
Frida Giannini's populist approach to Gucci has the ability to divide opinion between girls all over the world who see nothing wrong with buying into her accessible channeling of trends, and critics who wish for something more directional at this level of luxe. Still, in these extreme times, maybe that's splitting hairs. When a designer sees her market, it would be insanity not to go for it, and in Giannini's case, that means aiming at nightclubbing girls who might be tempted by a glittery upgrade on the slick-leather leg and big-top look all urban teenagers are rocking this year.The legwear was either a case of black skintight thigh-high boots disappearing into the hemline of tunic tops, or leggings patchworked in suede, leather, and patent coming down in the opposite direction to cover the foot (often it was hard to tell which was which). The top halves were either kimono T-shirts or, for evening, tiny, drapey iridescent-crystal mesh dresses (inspired by Tina Chow, according to program notes). With the slicked-back hair, crimson lips, and mirrored shades, it was hard glamour for hard times, with the occasional half glance back at Tom Ford's heyday in a blue fox chubby or a skimpy one-shoulder black jersey dress with a slice of patent in the neck.Giannini's personal imprint, repeated many times throughout the show, is the "Frida" pantsuit, which she introduced as a boyish balancer for all the glam gowns in her first collection. Now it has acquired bigger shoulders and a relaxed-hip, skinny-leg trouser fit, and, given its many representations in fabric options running fromchangeant-shot silk to jacquard to silver sequin to metallic leopard spot, it must be vindicating itself as a house best seller. For which, well done. Still, Giannini's insistence on hammering it home in all those exhaustive options is one of the things about her commercial style of showing that makes a crowd of critics mentally drum its fingers with impatience.
27 February 2009
Frida Giannini is from a different generation than Milan's other female designers, and she sees fashion from a more pragmatic standpoint. Gucci now is a clearly segmented, businesslike collection with no pretense of being anything other than hip, immediately understandable clothes for a young global audience. The time for runway fantasia has passed here, so even though Giannini named her Spring show "Gucci Exotica," she made sure to balance realistic streetwear with the beach-babe bikinis, tropical prints, and filmy disco dresses—while, of course, underlining the vital bag news of the house: an up-sized, slouchier, hand-stitched "New Jackie," and a utilitarian backpack that transforms into a carryall.Since her first collection, Giannini has always included a boyish suit with a narrow "Frida pant" somewhere along the line. In this show, it came to the fore as an unmissable Gucci signature. Topped with a mannish straw fedora, it opened the show in pale blue and then reappeared in heavy rotation with mini caftans in cobalt, aqua, khaki, and then purple. Another central plank of Gucci's identity is the neat deluxe leather jacket. This season it reappeared as python bikers and vests, marking a scene shift into safari suits and gold-zippered military-cum-cargo looks. As is the house tradition, the lights then went down and up again and out came the finale gowns in filmy bluish-green prints or draped jersey. It wasn't a season to lift fashion to places it's never been before—more a careful ticking of all the Gucci boxes. These, after all, are risk-averse times.
23 September 2008
Upon arriving at Gucci's cruise show, it was hard to know where to look—at the acres of tanned skin, tawny hair, and jewel-colored dresses lining the runway, or at the seventies redux collection coming down it. This was the last stop in what's turned out to be a season tour of spectacular venues: Chanel in Miami, DVF in Florence, and now Gucci, mounted in the garden of the seventeenth-century Villa Aurelia in Rome, the exact spot where Frida Giannini had her wedding party three years ago. (She's a local girl made good, and the occasion was both a triumphant, sentimental homecoming and an excuse to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the opening of Gucci's Via Condotti store in the city.)The clothes; the bouncing, center-parted hair; and the seventies vibe were all indivisible from Giannini's own style: a contemporary cherry-picking of casual-glam, jet-set dressing as caught in the flashbulbs of the paparazzi 30 years ago. She quoted Talitha Getty, Lee Radziwill, and Jane Birkin as direct inspiration: Getty for the long, flowy gypsy dresses; Radziwill for the neat banded coats; and Birkin for the teeny-tiny thigh-high smocks trimmed with broderie anglaise. Principally, though, it was a rendering of everything Giannini habitually plays with from the Gucci archive and makes her own—here in a palette of white, caramel, burnt orange, teal, and python. There were seashell scarf prints on chiffon, rib-cinching patchwork suede jackets, leather bombers with scallop cutouts or rose tattoo prints, disco-era cross-laced blouses, gold pendants with enamel scallops, and thick, silk cord belts looped through crisp white flares. The standouts: a pair of stacked espadrilles with a fringed suede ankle strap, the big low-slung python shoulder bag with a fold-over flap, and five different printed multilayer chiffon maxi dresses. It turns out, the dresses are special editions destined to be sold only in Rome. Right after the show, Giannini was already putting one of them—a black version with a twisted scarf neckline—through its party paces. It looked right at home.
7 July 2008
Gucci's press notes invoked "the new way in which youth and luxury can seamlessly coexist." The notion that there might be a new generation hungry for her wares has been Frida Giannini's career impetus. "We don't care about the old folks talkin' 'bout the old style," indeed. Except it wasn't that "old" catwalk classic that soundtracked her show. Instead, Giannini enlisted MGMT's "Time to Pretend" ("this is our decision to live fast and die young") to help put her own thumbprint on the heritage of the house.The Brooklyn duo's florid style dictated the shape as well as the sound of the collection. The lean tailoring and the neat little leathers that Giannini loves were sneakily overtaken by a creeping jungle of tropical flora and fauna, embroidered, appliquéd, or airbrushed to spectacular effect. Even the shoes weren't safe. Never mind the embroidered hibiscuses, they also had brightly colored heels of crocodile. Those same flowers were also embroidered on a python jacket, beaded on a biker jacket, and printed trailing up the legs of white jeans. They were so exuberantly, almost vulgarly, lush as to raise a smile. (Giannini did, after all, say that her definition of the collection was "happiness.")She offered her Tropicana club kids jeans in dégradé shades of sunset or printed with palm fronds; shirts decorated with toucans and parrots; perforated-leather safari shorts…The guy in the parka and striped jeans, fresh off his Vespa, looked almost out of place. He was from Giannini's old world. Now she has geographically relocated to a fantasyland of rich hippie/gypsy chic. Although the relative restraint of black-and-white jacquard tuxes with their tone-on-tone embroidery harked back to earlier collections when Frida was finding her way, the huge amethyst-and-malachite belt buckles she showed them with were definitely picking up signals from Planet MGMT.
22 June 2008
If you had to brainstorm the quintessential formula for Gucci-ness—the sexy, show-offy core of the brand's proposition— you'd probably come up with something like "rock chick deluxe." Frida Giannini got that feeling across for Fall by staging a raid on the Russian/Cossack/folklore department of the hippie wardrobe—the kind of printy, shaggy, peasanty things London groupies picked up at Portobello market in the early seventies, but scrubbed up to match today's luxury values, of course.The potential banality of that starting point was parlayed— through multiple accessories, detailed handwork, and a lot of fur—into a collection that ranks as one of Giannini's most confident so far. She began with a billowy-sleeved embroidered peasant blouse over a pair of gold chain-swathed hipsters, thrust into flat riding boots reminiscent of the louche heyday of Rudolf Nureyev. From there, the show swung into tapestry coats, short chiffon print dresses with flippy skirts, and a plethora of cropped ribbon and stud-embellished vests and coats in shearling and Mongolian lamb. All this was rife with references to hussars and the folk textiles of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and it was finished with gold-chain bracelets, heart-shaped neckpieces, flying leather fringes on hobo shoulder bags, and the new "Babushka" carpet bag.As a whole, the show didn't engage in any of the current dialogues (or are they anxiety attacks?) about where fashion is going. Perhaps, though, that's a kind of strength in itself. On the pragmatic side, this richly layered collection will separate out into dozens of affordable items. And on the other, there are a whole series of exceptional pieces, like the short lynx jacket and the tiered, feathery fox, whose appeal to the recession-proof superrich of the world could lie in the very fact that they don't fit in with any general trend. It'll be no surprise if many customers turn out to be Russian themselves.
19 February 2008
Frida Giannini had a vision of Russia in her head when she was working on her new men's collection. Kommissars and party apparatchiks? No. Oligarchs? No, not that one either. Frida was dreaming about tousle-haired, dark-eyed gypsy boys and their wild Cossack style. Eugene Hutz and Gogol Bordello? She's been listening to them and loving them. So picture a folkish printed tunic, its waist slung low with scarves and chains dangling with coins and charms, and you're getting close to the romantic heart of this collection. Post-show, Giannini agreed that her ideal of Russia and her Roman roots had a lot in common. "Energy, an irreverent way to live," she mused. "You can invent your life day by day without any plan."Perhaps one could credit that sense of spontaneous reinvention for the more costumey extremes, like an evening group that wouldn't have been out of place in the toy kingdom of Ruritania with its braiding, bouclé, and brass hardware on black mink. Gucci's deep pockets clearly inspire Giannini to push the boat out into dangerous waters, but moments of relative restraint accounted for the collection's most appealing pieces. All those folk-art prints, for instance, looked fresh. A chunky gray knit turned must-have with a studded leather trim. Coins and charms were not only wrapped around waists, they also winningly decorated the placket of a shirt and piled onto a messenger bag. Coats and jackets were enhanced with velvet and fur trims (as opposed to the full whack of an astrakhan coat, for example). And a ponyskin biker jacket lined in beaver (worn over striped jeans) felt like the essence of Giannini's casual/opulent/young ethos. Her ability to make her fantasies real was her original strength. Here, she went some way to recapturing it.
13 January 2008
Frida Giannini's Spring collection was a difficult thing to categorize. Granted, she had picked up on some of the things going around this season—the fifties big-skirted silhouette, a bit of toga dressing, patent-leather accessories. Alongside that, she put in some of her more pragmatic daywear: the new Frida trouser (roomier in the hip, slouchier in the crotch, narrowed in the leg), boyish checked shirts, and the odd little cropped biker jacket, including a noticeably good one in black snakeskin.It was hard, however, to warm to the whole. Part of the problem was the unrelenting combination of black, white, and a particularly harsh sunflower yellow, which played through oversize abstract flower-print mini deb dresses and bustier bubbles, and never gave up until the last red-carpet taffeta gowns left the runway. Sequencing-wise, the show was bumpy, too, with much reiteration of the same shapes in different fabrications. For evening—a Gucci heartland—the dresses came with broad belts and the occasional integral shoulder strap fastened with oversize horse bits—a house signature that seemed to weigh all too heavily on everything in sight. It was an off moment, or maybe just an example of performance nerves from a young designer who has so much to live up to. Giannini's recent Resort show was better and more coherent than this, so by the time both collections hit stores and are blended together, it's possible the result will be just fine.
25 September 2007
Frida Giannini never stops finding inspiration in her hometown, Rome—someone should give that girl the keys to the city. For her latest men's collection, she'd been spending time at the legendary film studio Cinecittà, looking at fifties-era photos of actors like Marcello Mastroianni in their white suits and piqué polo shirts. But sportswear as we understand it now didn't exist in Italy then, so, to bring things up to this century, Giannini also drew on the boys the Romans calladorable caniglia, who twist tradition with a little sartorial eccentricity. Then, to add some unambiguously masculine spice, she injected a dash of speed demon Steve McQueen in the form of aerodynamic biker jackets and pants.Giannini's recipe needed that weight because, in the end, what really stood out was her own playful Gucci-lite sensibility: leather jackets in silver, white, butter yellow, or lacquered black paired with skinny trousers in bold checks or bright colors, which had an almost cartoonish flair that evoked the eighties. Also echoing that decade was the new-wave smartness of a check suit, striped shirt, and spotted tie combination (the effect was compounded by the soft, Capezio-like shoes in white or silver). Giannini claimed the checks actually came from her research into the fifties at Cinecittà, but it was men she was looking at in those old photos, and it's boys she's dressing when she matches Mastroianni's smart checks with a green suede baseball jacket. Though the look still has its charms, it might be time to move on up.
24 June 2007
Forget flowers and frills—those tried-and-true motifs of resort collections. Frida Giannini went rockabilly. Working in a stark palette of black and white with shots of citrus brights, she turned out full skirts and fitted tops for sweater girls with a wild side. Grommeted leather biker jackets, driving gloves, and dark sunglasses added to the show's theme. But Giannini's models are rebels without a cause, in the sense that at the new Gucci, there are no rough edges. Elaborate, all-over embroidery decorated a dirndl skirt, and graphic bamboo and coral prints added a sunny note to shirtdresses and a cape-like top.Working off a motif from the Fall show, the necklines of cocktail dresses were decorated with brooches. As embellishments, they were more convincing than the campy logo patches that appeared on T-shirts and sweaters. It's St. Bart's or Mustique, after all, and not a suburban bowling alley, that these clothes are destined for. Some of the pieces, like a bandeau bikini with sexy boy-cut bottoms in a small check, were well suited to those Caribbean hot spots, while a black, red, and white color-block dress would make a sophisticated addition to a vacation wardrobe, no matter what the destination.
13 June 2007
When Frida Giannini showed pretty, forties-influenced, floral-printed silk dresses and blouses in her first collection for Gucci, they were a commercial hit. This Fall, after veering through glam-rock disco and last summer's folkloric frocks, she returned to vintage-inspired dressmaking. "I've been reading a biography of Lee Miller, a woman who started off as a model, became a friend of the surrealists and then a war photographer for BritishVogue—a strong woman with two sides to her," she explained, adding, "I was thinking about the dresses of the thirties and forties, with high waists and emphasis on the shoulder."As a new proposition for Gucci in a less sexed-up era, the dresses worked. Giannini dropped the print and worked on a silhouette with puffed shoulders and narrow, long sleeves that hit the right note of covered-up femininity, albeit with little peeks of plunging neckline or naked back—this is still Gucci, after all. Since the idea of the forties is gaining traction this season, these dresses—especially the black finale glamour gowns with Schiaparelli-esque sun-ray embroideries at the shoulder—steered this part of the collection in line with the general direction of fashion at large.By contrast, tweedy knickers and vaguely Tyrolean jackets in the daywear section seemed more out on a limb, and the big duffel tote—wielded as the season's must-have bag—missed the ineffable quality of "It," no matter how insistently it was shown. There were eye-catching pieces, though, like a tiny burgundy suede bomber trimmed with leather, inspired by Gucci's seventies archive, and a couple of assertively patchworked furs aimed squarely at the tastes of the brand's die-hard rock-chick faithful.
20 February 2007
The nonwinter that European ski resorts are currently enduring is one more reason to reflect upon the implications of global warming, and Frida Giannini was not the only designer to wonder this season if the lifestyle she was celebrating in her new collection might be a thing of the past. If this is indeed the endgame for winter wonderlands, Giannini is at least determined they'll fade out in style. Against a stone-paved and crested backdrop that subtly evoked one of King Ludwig's lodges, she offered up a charming, funny, and luxe-lite salute to the Alpen winter ritual. If an extravagant fur coat thrown over a chunky, white rollneck and plaid pants raised the specter of Gunther Sachs in full playboy cry, Giannini was equally capable of channeling the romantic young swains that preoccupy artist Elizabeth Peyton. Hence her original take on eveningwear, which hybridized a ski suit and a tux. (Just when we were thinking skinny was so last year, we're face to face with the apotheosis of lean!)But it was exactly that sense of young bucks at play that trimmed the fat out of such Tyrolean specials as a forest-green suede jacket (lamb-lined, leather-piped) or stolidly bourgeois winter wool plaid suits. One always felt that Giannini was having fun, especially when she tacked on the crests and feather cockades, or sent her boys out in mukluks and black leather pants. When a burgundy astrakhan smoking jacket appeared on the catwalk to a blast of Bond music, it was more Moore than Connery (never mind Craig). Giannini called it "Snow Glam," and it's a major part of her achievement at Gucci that there is no room for irony in her chalet.
15 January 2007
Frida Giannini decided to steer Gucci out of the seventies disco for spring, further away from the hot-and-sexy territory so emphatically occupied by Tom Ford. "I've been thinking about the early sixties, and a few things from the archive," she said of a show that began with short black coats and dresses piped in purple, orange, and red and that was grounded with block-heeled flats. It's Gucci's 85th anniversary, and Giannini's thoughts had probably been set in motion by flicking through paparazzi photos of the leggy likes of Ursula Andress and Britt Ekland, shopping at the company's Rome branch. But in the end, what she put on the runway had more to do with her efforts to broaden the brand's accessibility to young women than with reciting the history.The collection looked best when Giannini stuck to graphic shifts. Decorated with hexagons of silver beading on white, they were worn with cute silver space-age flats. A few long, patchwork-print Empire scarf dresses—a revisiting of an idea in her first resort collection—had a similarly unforced appeal. She also showed refabricated updates of the skinny pants, boxy jackets, and low-heeled Beatle boots that were a hit for spring. Ultimately, though, the pressure to show a variety of potential hot sellers made for a lack of coherence. A puzzling passage of folkloric, vaguely Tyrolean printed dresses in the middle seemed to have nothing much to do with the rest, nor did it make any connection to trends emerging elsewhere. Not to say these looks won't be nice for a girly vacation come next summer, but to put forward a stronger point of view, Giannini needs to learn what's for retail racks, and what makes a concise statement in a show.
26 September 2006
The very personal inspirations that Frida Giannini draws on have already yielded some striking and successful clothes for her own gender, but given her lack of experience in the male arena, there was an inevitable question mark hanging over her Gucci men's debut. In the event, she made a very smart decision to reconcile the house's womenswear and menswear. Now, the Gucci woman and the Gucci man look as if they might actually have something in common. Frida thinks about girls like herself when she designs for women, and here she was obviously imagining the kind of boys that girls like herself would want to hang with. Boys from her hometown, Rome, perhaps? "Definitely!" she cried backstage.Indeed, it was easy to imagine a flash young Arrigo striding along the Via Veneto in Giannini's exuberant clash of patterns and colors: the jacket with its tie-print motif, the loud shirt, the louder tie. Add the tight pinstripe hipsters, the Beatle boots, and the floppy hairdos, and the image is clear - ragazzi con brio! The fitted little suede and leather jacket, studded with grommets, made the point even more strongly. You could easily picture something similar being worn by an It boy on Capri in the sixties, during one of Gucci's earlier moments of triumph.If the show—with its loud prints, two-tone shoes, eensy suede shorts, and bathing suits accessorized with fringed boots—was hardly subtle, it had an exuberance that managed to be simultaneously sexy and innocent. Rather like Giannini herself, in fact. And if she can stay true to that, chances are she'll take Gucci to places it hasn't been before.
27 June 2006
Say so long to glam rock. Gucci's Frida Giannini has traded in fall's gold pantsuits and ultrashort metallic jersey dresses for smocking, folksy lace, nautical details, and dolphin prints. This resort collection marks Giannini's first anniversary as creative director of the house's womenswear line and a shift back to the feminine and more nonchalant look of her debut efforts. The show, at Milk Studios' sun-drenched new penthouse, began with a reworking of her mega-successful multicolor Flora print in porcelain blue and ivory. It appeared on a slim coat, a strapless peasant dress, and a maillot paired with pinstripe short shorts that were subtly suggestive, rather than overt. Ditto the colorblocked, almost crafty, jersey pieces and the sleeveless minidresses trimmed with poufy lace—despite eyebrow-raising upper-thigh hemlines, they were resolutely sweet.Only the leather and suede motocross jackets in snow white and deep burgundy, along with a few jersey evening numbers (a short halter style in wine with gold leather straps was the standout), hinted at the sex and flash that Tom Ford made synonymous with the brand. Fair enough, perhaps—his successor has to find her own way. Still, the accessories could have used a bit more pop. Giannini has taken the label in a breezier direction this season—to "1960s St. Tropez," said her program notes—but salt water, sand, and sun be damned, the Gucci girl expects a souped-up and superluxe bag.
13 June 2006
Gold pantsuits, Ziggy eyes, ultraminis, and patchwork purple crocodile biker jackets: Yes, Frida Giannini is doing glam rock for fall. "I was thinking of David Bowie and the way people played with their image to be something different every time they went out in the seventies," she said. "It's less romantic and more about energy and showing off."That, of course, puts Gucci out on its own, given the sobriety- and restraint-obsessed mood of Milan, but you can see Giannini's thinking. Monasticism and abstract experimentalism would be nonsense on a Gucci runway. Its meaning in the world is as a nonintellectual, good-time brand, and in any case, when all around is going gray, there's always a need for a bit of flash.Giannini's take on the label's recent heritage wasn't quite Tom Ford's all-out orgy of glamour. But she did slip in some knowingly high-nineties accessories: metal bags chained to a fetishy cuff, and a pair of high-shine cranberry platforms in the same techno "car paint" finish Ford used in his first collection a decade ago. As for the clothes, some of her ultrashort metallic jersey dresses actually read as more sub-Versace (which is a reference many young designers are enthusiastic about now), though she also tempered things with maxi, printed, and sequined options for the slightly more modest nightclubber. Even at their least wild, though, these looks weren't designed to be seen during daylight hours. It would be interesting to see Giannini take the collection beyond evening next time.
21 February 2006
John Ray is homesick for his native Scotland. Or at least that's how it would seem, judging from his latest Gucci collection. After several seasons of elegance fit for an Italian aristocrat, Ray was inspired to cut loose by the portraits of some of his favorite old Scottish artists. "Wild and romantic" was what he was looking for. With their voluminous coats, high boots, and streaming hair, the models did indeed look like they'd just spent several centuries making their way down from the Highlands.Coats were the key component of the collection: hems dipped, backs were pleated for extra volume; one almost swept the floor in a highwayman style. To this reviewer, at least, the proportions seemed slightly off. I'm all for a break from the tyranny of skinny tailoring, but these coats were almost too big.Underneath, Ray showed a series of poetically flowing voile shirts with ruffles or lace sleeves. Trousers throughout were tucked into boots, with a ruff of cashmere sock at the top. He gave his poet a shot of punk with a mohair sweater (a frill peeking over its collar) and a plaid shirt in wool flannel. Pair that with a scarf flowing from the waist, and for one mad moment, Axl Rose stalked the Gucci catwalk—that, for good or ill, is about as far from Luchino Visconti as you can get.
17 January 2006
Ten years after Tom Ford delivered his groundbreaking velvet boot-cut collection, something fresh has finally arrived to revive the buzz at Gucci. It's colorful, ripe with prints, full of feminine, seventies-flavored forties dresses, and it's by a 32-year-old woman, Frida Giannini. "We've come out of a long period of monochrome," she said. "And I love prints and colors. What I want to do is an intelligent kind of glamour for my generation. I think in this century, every woman wants a private life. You can explore more things than celebrity and the Oscars."After Alessandra Facchinetti's two-season stint at Gucci, Giannini was promoted on the strength of her Flora-print accessory collection, the motif of which was lifted from a fifties Gucci scarf made for Grace Kelly. For spring, she started with boyish day suits—narrow jackets with puffed shoulders, rugby shirts, and skinny mod pants—worn with flat patent boots emblazoned with Gucci horse bits. That look wasn't completely convincing top to toe, but when her print blouses with fluttery cap sleeves and above-the-knee dresses began to walk out, things looked up. Clearly influenced by Saint Laurent's famous 1970 forties collection, the shoes were high patent and suede platform ankle straps.Giannini's take on Gucci's brand of sexy is more a matter of a bared back than an exposed front. She designed her long, linear "hostess" gowns with "a party with friends" in mind, rather than full-on occasions. A couple of them strayed into Rochas territory, but the best, a long cyclamen gown, and the finale, with its pin-tucked top, puff sleeves, and embroidered crystal flowers, had enough presence to go anywhere. Like Phoebe Philo at Chloé, Giannini is determined to set a mandate for a new kind of wearability. Whatever else this collection had going for it, it was different enough to prove that the page has been turned on the dark, erotic look of Tom Ford's nineties.
27 September 2005
In the 1990s, Gucci was emblematic of the democratization of luxury. John Ray seems determined to reverse the process, resuscitating luxury as a private pleasure to be savored by a discerning few. His sumptuous collection for fall 2005 arrived in store windows on Milan's Via Montenapoleone just as he was showing the next step, for spring 2006. The essence of his new presentation was still elegant formality (Ray is fascinated by the notion of changing throughout the day), but done with the lightness demanded by spring.So the first passage was all white—a ribbed sweater, say, with cuffed trousers cropped to just above the ankle and espadrilles as a casual accompaniment. The collection's body-consciousness was striking in suitings, including knit jackets that molded to the torso. Silk shirts were printed with Japanese-influenced monochrome floral patterns, subtle but rich. Ray's fondness for Helmut Berger in his Visconti-era lushness explained the occasional misstep—like the black-trimmed cream cashmere "kept boy" robe—and those eensy bathing suits were a jarring blast of Gucci past. But Ray has genuine vision, and an uncompromising faith in the modern male's desire to dress up. Hence the final evening passage, from white dinner jacket to tails. Seated front-row, an enthused Kanye West declared his willingness to wear just about everything—even the tails, "if I was going to conduct an orchestra."
28 June 2005
On the surface of it, Gucci is behaving as if nothing has changed. The audience turns up at the darkened theater Tom Ford created to house his shows—same towering floral display in the foyer, same drinks reception, same deep-pile carpeted runway. Yet Ford departed a year ago, time and fashion have shifted, and just by showing in the sexed-up nineties venue her former master established, Alessandra Facchinetti is setting herself up for invidious comparisons with a lost era, before the audience even sits down.She made a determined start with a military march on the soundtrack and a blue-black silhouette carved out of high Napoleonic collar jackets, balloon-sleeve taffeta blousons, plunging ruffle-neck shirts, and a reissue of the skin-tight pants that were a Ford perennial. The detail in those jackets, bands of velvet or black-on-black embroideries of roses, presented a vixenish version of the dark, Russian vibe currently running through Milan. From there, though, Facchinetti realized she had to move forward. "I wanted a certain elegance and rigor, but I also wanted to find something more intimate," she explained. "The hardness, we already know about at Gucci. I wanted something more intimate and poetic, so I looked at Victorian and Empire style."But what counts as intimate these days? Is it a high-collar dress with a big oval opening in the front to display the breasts? Is there poetry in an off-the-shoulder chiffon Marie Antoinette milkmaid neckline when combined with a torso tightly bandaged with lashings of jersey? It was in these moments that Facchinetti's difficulty in setting a new post-Ford agenda for Gucci showed. It came over better when she offered a less frantically worked red carpet Empire-line gown covered in a spider web of spangled tulle, but still, the specter of Ford's triumphal finales seemed to haunt this runway. Perhaps Facchinetti will eventually work her way toward the more gracefully feminine feeling she talked about, but that won't happen unless she stops carrying Gucci's recent history so heavily on her shoulders.
22 February 2005
The soaring poignancy of Alexandre Desplat's soundtrack for the movieBirthset the mood perfectly for John Ray's second collection for Gucci, with dewy-eyed young Byrons wearing clothes of such sumptuous simplicity they evoked the rigor and chic of the original dandy Beau Brummel.Ray claimed backstage that it was more of an Italian connection he'd been after, so he and his team studied Visconti films:The Leopard,The Damned,and especially a segment Visconti directed forBoccaccio '70,which helped inspire the collection's color scheme of black, white, and, most hauntingly, a silvery gray that, in a velvet jacket over full corduroy trousers, had the sheen of moth's wings.The show itself played as a kind of journey, from the city (outstanding coats, including a greatcoat in black wool, another in a mushroomy astrakhan) to the country (quilted leathers, tweed suits and trench coats, and a capacious weekend bag made from a Gucci-striped horse blanket) and back again (formal eveningwear, midnight-blue velvet smoking jackets).The common thread was an uncompromising luxe: there was nothing worn, distressed, or sauvage anywhere in sight. The haunted urgency of the young models, their necks swaddled in long scarves, may have suggested Romantic poets, but Ray insisted it was purity, rather than romance, he wanted to convey.He got both.
18 January 2005
How weird, exciting, and unimaginably stressful it must have been for Alessandra Facchinetti to send out her first collection for Gucci. In the very same high-gloss venue so recently and dramatically vacated by Tom Ford, this was the evening on which the 32-year-old understudy had to take her first steps as an ingénue—all in the glare of worldwide publicity, and under the weight of immense corporate and creative expectations.In the event, Facchinetti didn't veer very far from the Ford formula. Her opening look, a dusty-brown safari jacket cinched over a form-hugging fringed and tasseled woven skirt, gave a hint of her seasonal theme: a touch Indian, but transformed into a statement of Italianate sexuality. What followed—the brick-red crocodile cutaway fashion-rocker jackets; corseted bustiers; skinny pants; clinging, highly worked opaque/sheer paneled dresses; and skimpily provocative Swarovski-jeweled backless pieces—clearly carried the same stamp as Ford-era design, if not quite moving at the same adrenalin-surging pace.So what had the assistant been contributing, and what was the master's responsibility? That's an issue that can only be clarified over time. At present, it's enough to ask of Facchinetti and her co-workers that they show a pragmatic ability to keep a mega-brand going. That they did—though the fact that this collection is now being directed from a female-led Milanese design room (relocated from Ford's London base) is certain to make a difference of some kind.Meanwhile, another debutante was showing her hand this evening: Frida Giannini, the young woman responsible for designing the great bags, shoes, belts, and sunglasses that came down the runway. Because accessories are the foundation of Gucci's global success, the highly desirable velvet, leather, and gold-enamel-studded Pelham bag deserves at least an equal share of the limelight.
29 September 2004
Whatever size they may be in reality, Tom Ford's shoes are symbolically huge to fill. So John Ray, the new creative director of menswear at Gucci, took the sensible route: honor the archive, respect the self. To that end, he zeroed in on a period of Gucci's past that dovetailed neatly with his own predilection for louche London life. It wasn't exactly the first time Gucci has revived the rich-hippie look, but Ray added a moneyed, aristocratic edge that suggested Paul and Talitha Getty partying with Mick Jagger and Christopher Gibbs in Marrakesh in the heady late sixties. The heavily embroidered tops that opened the show were bedecked with beads and coins, just the sort of thing haute bohemians acquired on the renowned hippie trail to remind themselves of the joy of travel; ditto the chiffon djellabas that closed the show. The butterfly-print shirts and evening brocades amplified that theme, but Ray was careful to ground his decorative excesses with beautifully cut half-belted jackets, white trousers, and gorgeous Gucci croc loafers and totes. At the start of his new journey into the heart of Gucci, Ray seems to have his bearings firmly in place.
28 June 2004
The emotional ending of the Tom Ford era at Gucci was a look back in glamour—a fabulous farewell in which this perfection-obsessed superstar of fashion seized the moment to run his eye over everything he has achieved for the brand, and then do it better. There is no doubt who the Gucci woman is: the embodiment of sexual confidence, burnished to a high gloss and bursting with predatory power. A symbolic figure of the past decade's hedonistic highs, she spike-heeled her way down a runway carpeted with pink fur, luxuriating in Ford's aesthetic one last time.And it has become elaborate of late. Even when he cuts a mean-looking black skirtsuit, it will be fanatically worked to the body, ruched to the ribs, and pieced in multiple complex slivers to grip the derriere. So too with the jackets, which have become ultra-decadent amalgams of dyed fox, croc, and suede, cut to emphasize a big shoulder and clinch the torso in bursts of sunray patchwork.The buildup began as Ford took his audience through a knowing, celebratory series of flashbacks. There were the blue velvet jackets of his first 1995 hit, paired with nude beaded pants from a later blockbuster. A new manifestation of the 1999 sellout white coat with a knotted leather belt, its glamour amped to overload with an entire white fox snaking the shoulders. Variations on the crystal-sprinkled flesh-colored goddess gown famously worn by Nicole Kidman at the Met, even more beautifully realized than the original.Ford outdid himself as well with event-making eveningwear. There were slithering sequined mermaid gowns, the ultimate done in a fantastically evil shade of green and wrapped in an arrogant fox-and-chiffon stole. But the emotional crescendo came from the white cutout jersey dresses that closed the show. A reprise of Ford's favorite collection of fall '96, they came more softly draped and subtly constructed than the originals. He bestowed the best on Georgina Grenville, making a nostalgic comeback appearance in her role as the ultimate high-nineties Gucci model. She looked overwhelmed at the thunderous applause that accompanied her final walk, the perfect signoff to the extraordinary drama of Ford's years at Gucci.
24 February 2004
Who is the Gucci girl this season? “She’s eye candy!”Tom Ford laughed backstage. Of course she is. Glamour and provocation are at the core of the sex machine Ford has built at Gucci and, in a time when the pleasure principle is driving fashion, he knows how to push all the right buttons. He kicked things off with a little contradiction: silky track pants with a sporty ribbon running down the side and sloppy, semi-sheer tees, put together with exquisitely classy jackets and high gold sandals. Call it casual/couture, revved up with a flash of gotta-have-it trash in the all-important accessory department.Over the last few seasons, as Ford has immersed himself in the culture of couture at Saint Laurent, his focus on cut and detail has become intense. That heightened awareness showed up in the delicious Gucci spring jacket—a feminine, body-hugging number with tiny, pleated fans forming a peplum in back—and in the minute waffles of tucks and pleats inserted into nude satins, which turned up in pants, jackets, and dresses.But back to the eye-candy issue. For after dark, Ford produced a parade of red-carpet cuties, snuggled in feathery swan’s-down boleros (in pristine white, egg-yolk yellow, or fuchsia) over curvily constructed knee-length chiffons. For the less sweet-toothed, he sent out the glitter snakes—serpentine crystal motifs wound around the torso or up the arms of black dresses. That's all strictly for high-flying candies, of course. For the rest of us, there are always the bags: madly excessive constructions involving purple, green, and bronze metallic snakes writhing decadently over signature GGs—more temptation than any girl can stand.
1 October 2003
This season every major designer is talking about creating a "beauty" strong enough to defy our anxious times. Backstage that was the word Tom Ford used to characterize his Fall collection for Gucci—a collection in which beauty was personified as a power vixen extravagantly armored to face down a troubled world.She made her first entrance in a white coat with a huge collar, ballooning pushed-up sleeves and a full skirt, her midsection lashed into a buckled, corseted belt. With wicked black, spiky over-the-knee boots and long leather gloves, she struck the high-glam silhouette that dominated the show through a sequence of coats, jackets and slinky skirts seamed to cling to every dangerous curve.The Gucci mini of last season was dropped—literally. Now the length is back down to the knee, with the emphasis on dramatic upstanding collars and voluminous sleeves, often exaggerated in fur and contrasted with the erotic suggestiveness of lingerie beneath. The skirts and dresses—paneled, ruched and pieced together with strips of ribbon—called up comparisons with corsetry. For evening, there were gowns constructed with cutout zones of sparkling mesh and frilled bra tops; others snaked to the floor, held in place with complex asymmetric straps crossing the torso and shoulders.If Ford is treading the territory mapped out by Thierry Mugler and Azzedine Alaïa in the ’80s, it’s no surprise. Much of fashion is heading in that direction anyway, and Ford, after all, bases Gucci’s entire brand proposition on finding new ways of upping the ante on sex season after season.
28 February 2003
The Gucci girl’s got legs—long, tan, flawless ones striding along on silver peep-toe sling-back pumps. Follow them all the way up, and around two weeks later, they eventually meet the hem of the minutest piece of clothing that was ever called a skirt or dress. For spring, in a word, Tom Ford saysshort.Using lustrous fabrics in subtle makeup colors from blush to tawny brown, pearly gray and silver, Ford draped and wrapped his gorgeous girls in clothes that navigated that dangerous Gucci line between innovation and vulgarity. The tousled hair, the jackets and tops poised to fall off shoulders—the whole presentation stirred sensations that fashion hasn’t felt since the last days of the great supermodels.Still, don’t think tacky. Ford’s obsession now is integrating fine workmanship into abbreviated silhouettes. He took the idea of a kimono and portrayed it first as a simple silk beach cover-up, then as an elegant formfitting dress, painstakingly made from hand-painted strips of silk. He brought couture finesse to racer-back feathered dresses with the merest flip of a skirt. And with lightest touch, he wove white and rose gold into fragile ribbons to tie around wrists—the most modern-looking jewelry in Milan. When Carmen Kass closed the show in a dress made entirely of the same precious ribbon, it was a confident statement in the power of glamour. And fashion needs that.
27 September 2002
In her skinny, skinny satin pants, vicious pointy ankle-strapped heels, tousled hair and falling-off-the-shoulder tops, the Gucci rock-chick is here stomping on stage for her come-back gig. And why not? When Tom Ford cut his smash-hits for Gucci in the mid-90s, they were for a woman with a fearlessly rockin’ attitude and a taste for dangerous luxe. Now she’s back with an even bigger, richer lineup of killer clothes to flaunt.Ford lavishes the luxury in new larger volumes that run from a chunky black knit with fur embedded in the seams to zigzag jacquard kimono jackets pulled in with obi belts, and a black satin blouson jacket worn with a sexy, tight pencil skirt. There are lean pants cut with a natural waist and so long they crumple at the ankle, or leg-lengthening flares that flow over the foot. The outerwear pieces, like big raincoats and oversize “boyfriend” jackets, get a touch of glam with satin trim.Ford lists his sources as the Hollywood of the ’20s and ’30s, a touch of Goth and an antique kimono collected on a trip to Japan, but his own obsession comes through in the intense details. “This is the most worked collection I’ve ever done at Gucci,” he said. “Women are only buying amazing items now. No one’s buying anything basic.”
1 March 2002
Forget fitted silhouettes and uptight elegance. Tom Ford is ushering in a relaxed, laid-back feeling at Gucci.Ford's new aesthetic marries hip-hop savoir faire—ultra-casual pants and asymmetrical-seam jackets were cut extra-wide—with Route 66 favorites like raw suede blazers, desert tops, and large coats that lace in the back. A stunning liquidy silk skirt was embellished with large floral cutouts; explorer shorts were worn with skimpy superfine knits. Ford showed gently gathered smocks and a double-layered black dress riveted with diminutive eyelet hooks—furthering the fresh spin on the romantic concepts he has explored of late.While not everyone will embrace Ford's new supersized proportions, there is bound to be unanimous enthusiasm for his self-assured evening gowns: frothy Empire concoctions that fall to the floor, with draped backs that offer a voyeuristic peek at the rigorously laced corsets underneath.
28 September 2001
Tom Ford opened his show with sharp, narrow trousers and a fitted three-button jacket—the essential Gucci laid-back uniform—making it perfectly clear that mod silhouettes are a key influence for Fall.Things got progressively interesting as multiple leather-trimmed zippers and large patch-pockets appeared on coats and pants; ruffled sheer pink tops softened the masculine tailoring, while yeti-like furs and massive lamb coats upped the glamour ante.The overall effect of the collection was one of assured sexiness: Short satin dresses with asymmetric necklines, basic tuxedo jackets and skimpy capelets all looked sophisticated and easy to wear. Ford also kept his accessories strong and simple: Coppery ankle-strap heels and flat boots were enough to make a powerful statement.For evening, Ford showed a series of sheer lingerie slips with binding brassiere overlays that most women will find less than practical for real life; his square-cut ribbon dresses, equipped with a side zipper for easy escape, were far more arresting.
1 March 2001
Sex is in the air for spring 2001, and Tom Ford has always known how to work the sleek, lean look better than anyone else. But for all the raciness of his collection, it seems that this time around Gucci is undergoing somewhat of an identity crisis.Black-and-white dominatrix-inspired looks opened the show, featuring corseted waists, rigid bustiers, and stiletto-heel shoe-boots. Massive purple satin suits alternated with safari jackets and extra-wide cargo pants; a wet T-shirt contest of manipulated, skimpy tank tops gave way to military-inspired jackets and trousers. There was also an immense dolman top, a short cape and a bat-sleeved, rubberized trenchcoat.With fashion’s decade-jumping game moving at breakneck speed, Alaïa, Saint Laurent, Mugler, Gaultier and even Dolce & Gabbana are all viable references. But are we prepared for a deflated pouf skirt with a huge cargo pocket? Cross-your-heart brassiere tops? What worked best at Gucci were the clothes that didn’t make an effort, like the straight satin trousers, ribbed tops and short, pleated dresses.
2 October 2000
VH1/Vogue Fashion AwardsDesigner of the Year Nominee Tom Ford's collection for Gucci was sleek, sensual and filled with the edgy sex appeal that has become his trademark. The show opened with a series of sharp and shiny silk gazar dresses and coats, featuring ornately ruffled necklines. Wool and cashmere looks included belted coats with carefully defined waists and leather-trimmed tweed suits. Ford quickly moved on to fitted, in-your-face motorcycle ensembles that were thoroughly young and urban. For evening, he turned the volume way up with an assortment of dazzling gold coats, slinky dresses and beaded gowns with plunging necklines. The entire collection was carried by Ford's deft way with shapes and materials, which allowed him to effortlessly create a feeling that was modern and chic.
21 February 2000
Sex sells, and no one knows that better than Tom Ford, who declared that Spring 2000 was about "Farrah Fawcett and Blondie, with a touch of Gwyneth Paltrow." Indeed, Gucci's catwalk sizzled with glamorous vixens swathed in python prints, leather trainer pants and sparkling jersey dresses—a movie star's dream wardrobe, circa 1979. This is certainly not the time to be shy with your clothing. Ford also showed leather jumpsuits, fitted pants with flared legs, strappy bathing suits with barely-there running shorts, and super-shiny shirts worn unbuttoned under fitted jackets. Bright-pink hosiery, stone-encrusted sandals and oversized sunglasses underscored the rock-star dimension of the unbridled glamfest.
27 September 1999
Following the thread of ourIn Vogue: The 1990spodcast, we are closing out the year and heading into the new one with a series of newly digitized archival shows from the decade that fashion can’t—and won’t—let go of. Designed by Tom Ford, Gucci’s spring 1999 ready-to-wear collection was presented in October 1998, in Milan.Tom Ford’s breakthrough Gucci moment was hisfall 1995 collectionof velvet suits and acid green silks that evoked the louche decadence of Studio 54. That 15-minute show made Gucci synonymous with s-e-x, and it shot Ford to fame.Three years later the public was still clamoring for “more, more, more.” Ford? Not so much. “After eight knockout seasons he had reached a creative roadblock,” reportedVoguein a 1999 profile. “It wasn’t that the master of timing had lost his touch with the public. Far from it. He was in a predicament most designers would love to have. His vision of cool, untouchable, hard-edged sex was still trendy, and Gucci’s hip-huggers, snaffle-bit shoes, and fox-fur chubbies were still must-buys. But Ford, who put the sophisticated yawn into clothes, was bored with his own creations.”That ennui seeped into Ford’s fall 1998 collection for Gucci, but the agile designer was back on track for spring 1999 when he ditched minimalism and early-’60s Jackie O. references in favor of a Summer of Love vibe.Ford figuratively let his hair down and embraced an earthier sensuality—not that there was any Woodstockian mud involved: Ford described the aesthetic as “Las Vegas hippie.” “CiaoStudio 54; hello Cher!” quipped journalist Michele Ingrassia.There was no question that Gucci hippies were haute and hot. They wore teeny-weeny bikinis in the same color-popping floral used on ruffled jersey dresses. (Ford returned to “the garden” for his namesake collection forspring 2021.) At the time the fringe, the mirror-work tops, and the heady floral prints seemed like a fun bohemian romp; twenty years later the beaded shoes, suede boots, and embellished jeans read differently. They clearly borrow, without credit, from Indigenous and African craft traditions.Voguedeemed the collection “a more colorful and upbeat take on sexiness that goes way beyond minimalism.” “These are eclectic, eccentric, and—I hate to use the word—happy clothes,” Ford toldThe Los Angeles Times.
30 December 2020
Tom Ford’ssuper-sexy Fall 1995 show for Gucci was, asVogue’sSarah Mowerhas put it, “one of those hitting-in-the-solar-plexus moments” for the fashion set. Two seasons later, his fall 1996 show had the same effect for a much broader audience, now receptive to Ford’s new/old take on glamour, and tiring of the waif. “People were maybe a little bit too afraid to celebrate hedonism on the runway,” Ford later said. Not so the be-stubbled Texan.Voguedubbed the show, which closed with showstopping white jersey gowns that nodded to Halston and Elsa Peretti, the “fashion equivalent of a one-night stand at Studio 54.”
1 March 1996
Fall 1995 wasn’tTom Ford’sfirst runway show forGucci,but it was the season he really arrived. The jewel-tone satin shirts unbuttoned to there . . . the velvet hip-huggers . . . the horsebit leather loafers with the race car finish . . . Paraded down a spotlighted Milan runway by the likes ofAmber Valletta,Shalom Harlow,andKate Moss,Ford’s seventies-tinged designs signaled a sexy, super-glam new direction for the previously sleepy brand. It was one that would earn the early endorsement ofMadonna(who wore the collection’s key look to that year’s MTV Video Music Awards), catapult the charismatic Ford himself to fame, and send Gucci’s fortunes skyrocketing.
1 March 1995