The celebrities and fashion coterie gathering at today’s Gucci resort show will be outfitted in oversized reading glasses, kitten-embellished jumpers, army coats and matador jackets studded with pink bows. Two years ago, this proposition would have been met with silence, waiting for the punchline.
Freedom is at the heart of Alessandro Michele’s approach to Gucci, and as the cruise 2017 collection unveils this afternoon at Westminster Abbey, we look to the brand’s present-day virtues to decipher what it is about Michele's specific vision for Gucci that we love.
1. Child-like fantasy
Autumn/winter 2016
An idiom goes that “adults are failed children”. If this is true, we love Michele for designing pieces that cause childhood reversion: cartoon animals, shooting stars, hearts, bows.
It is not simply the overt visual relationship to childhood that testifies to this. Long-haired fur, sequins, ruffles, marabou feathers, brocade – the clothes are a textural realm that rouse a kiddish curiosity and wanderlust in ourselves.
2. Gender fluidity
Autumn/winter 2016
The gap between menswear and womenswear is closing. It is the designers challenging old-fashioned notions of gender who are propelling this pragmatic movement. Alessandro Michele is one of these designers. Already flirting with coed catwalks in his tenure thus far, it was announced in April that the brand is officially unifying the staging of menswear and womenswear shows from spring/summer 2017 onward.
At the womenswear autumn/winter 2016 show, pastel-shaded organza gowns walked alongside grey, boxy undertaker coats on women; a male model wore a co-ord suit and pussy-bow shirt in pink floral, another wore a classic tux. The agenda is not to shove one character forward, instead, it is about inclusivity.
3. Object fetish
Autumn/winter 2015
Those fur loafers. Say no more. Each piece of a Gucci collection has its own personality, its own novelty, its own elevator pitch that immediately sells itself.
4. Uncool is cool
Pre-fall 2016
In a landscape marked by sportswear, repurposed denim and #nofilters, our zeitgeist is seemingly out of love with the infallible glamazon. We love the introduction of a somewhat awkward, bookish character to the Gucci lineup, a far more compelling and relevant hero to our collective mood.
5. Glitter
Pre-fall 2016
Michele’s Gucci is plastered in glitter. It is built into the infrastructure of the fantasy.
We can only speak for ourselves, but it irresistibly heightens the enchantment of the products, particularly with Michele’s proclivity for streetwear silhouettes: bomber jackets, beaten-up leather, vintage store-esque baggy jumpers – all gilded with shimmering details that lift them out of reality.
6. GUCCIGHOST
Autumn/winter 2016
It is not every brand that would respond to satire of their logo in the way Gucci did with GUCCIGHOST. The gloriously seedy GUCCIGHOST project of artist Trouble Andrew emerged across social media last year. The series of videos and images featured the interlocking G’s in spray-paint form, on the decks of skateboards, on the walls of dens, as the blearily glowing screensaver of a Windows 95, that all rejected the gloss of high fashion.
It is not the first instance of its kind – the Chanel logo transposed to dingy tableaux has become something of a meme – but Gucci’s response was novel.
Michele decided to collaborate with Trouble Andrew and the results are found in the autumn/winter 2016 womenswear collection, as shown above.
7. Trans-seasonal mix-and-match
We love the decision at Gucci to maintain (some level of) homogeneity across collections. It empowers the consumer to mix-and-match trans-seasonally, which is a more realistic and rational proposition than the often asserted, staid idea that clothes expire after one season.
8. Artistic allusions
Autumn/winter 2016
The Gucci muse is equipped with an arsenal of superb literary and artistic allusions. Seats at shows are furnished with sheets of paper carrying quotes from French and Italian philosophers, Edenic details are found across collections, in tapestries of gardens and serpents, autumn/winter 2017 was proliferated with Renaissance details: in silk prints, the silhouettes of hats, the pronounced shoulders of dresses. And of course, there’s Margot Tenenbaum of autumn/winter 2015.
9. Heritage
While the new Gucci is quite unrecognisable from its predecessors, it retains glimmers of the house’s heritage that we love. The jet-set 60s/70s silhouettes inherent to the house prevail, as do the red/green racing stripe and the Dionysus bag – but now, of course, with a Tumblr-tinted make-over of embellishments.
10. Contradictions
Autumn/winter 2016
The new Gucci is rife with good contradictions: it is child-like and grown-up, feminine and masculine, mod and rocker, prim and bohemian, book smart and street smart. In this way, it speaks to every demographic. It venerates oddness, peculiarity and alterity, and that’s definitely an ideology we can fall in love with.