The show marked Gucci’s 100th anniversary
You could view the first collection for Gucci’s 100th birthday this year as Alessandro Michele’s Re-Invention tour. A lifelong Madonna fan, the analogy won’t be lost on him. It’s the title the performer gave her 2004 greatest hits tour to sanctify a practice attributed to her throughout her career: the reinvention of symbols, icons, art, and herself. Like that concert, Michele’s show – titled Aria rather than autumn, in line with his operatic seasonality – revisited the hyper-referencing that has embodied his six years at Gucci, but reduced those ideas to his most crystal-clear collection to date. Stripped to its core messages, it was an experience for the people: a democratic anniversary tour through the house’s legacy – from Guccio Gucci to Tom Ford – and into a future carried by a surprising team-up with Balenciaga. “Everyone will be invited to this birthday party,” Michele explained in a post-show video conference. “It is an ultra-pop party focused on the brand’s DNA. I wanted to create a rebirth for this brand; for this myth, for this saga.”
It was an exercise in Gucci iconography
“I wanted something that could be understood by everybody, so I chose fashion’s most popular format: the catwalk,” Michele said, describing a Floria Sigismondi-directed film that imagined a secret club fitted with a runway lined with vintage cameras. Their flashes represented the Old Hollywood part of Gucci’s century of life, illuminating Marilyn Monroe-esque silhouettes that epitomised the show’s celebration of popular and obvious icons – something Michele and Madonna have in common, too. “In order to tell a story, I tried to find garments that were very primary, with primitive shapes,” he explained. They included big nods to Gucci’s own history, or “myth” as Michele repeatedly called it, pointing out how facts get blurred with time. Monogram canvas coats piped with leather referenced its beginnings as a luggage house for which Guccio Gucci’s drew inspiration from his years as a bellhop at the Savoy in London. Riding jackets, boots and helmets celebrated Gucci’s equestrian roots, which Michele fetishised into the harnesses and floggers of bondage iconography, much like Madonna before him.
Alessandro Michele paid homage to Tom Ford
Unlike a house such as Christian Dior, as Michele noted, Gucci isn’t defined by a visual universe created by a founding designer, but is a house that means different things to different people. To many of us, it means Tom Ford. Michele paid tribute to Ford’s Gucci in a series of suits that recalled his former boss’s tailoring, and, when styled with fetish gear, evoked the highly erotic culture Ford created at Gucci. “Tom was the first to realise that Gucci had this cult power: the power of symbols, a sort of magnetism, the power of a place I describe as a club,” Michele said. Though his own fetishised lens, that power easily related to the current consumption culture of the social media age, where fashion pieces are photographed, posted and worshipped like never before. In his imagined fetish club, Michele explained, “people make love to the objects of fashion. Fashion carries love, sensuality and many other things because we are passionate.” Those ideas have never been more expressed than through the logo-mania of our time, so synonymous with Gucci and Gen Z stars, like Billie Eilish, who wear it. With his Balenciaga hack, Michele took that mania to an unexplored, extreme terrain.
It featured a Balenciaga “hack”
If fashion shows are turning into blockbuster films in the pandemic era, are designers and brands becoming the new Hollywood stars? Speaking about his Marilyn Monroe influences, Michele compared Hollywood to “an Olympus producing supermen that are part of a very special world”. As looks began to appear in the show, which bore the unmistakable hand of Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia – a skewed silk evening top, an all-over floral graffiti print outfit with thigh-high boots – it was kind of like watching a Spider-Man film where Iron Man suddenly turns up. When outerwear sprawled with Gucci’s double-G monogram with Balenciaga’s diagonal logo plastered on top appeared, the cross-over went full Avengers. If it wasn’t the Marvel-verse, it was the Kering-verse – the parent company that owns both houses. “Demna really enjoyed the idea of me using his styles to transform them into something else,” Michele said. “It’s not fashion stealing from other designers, but I went to a friend’s house to steal. Here, I don’t feel the burden of the history some French brands have.” In merging two logo-spurring giants, Michele may have created the most bullet-proof merchandise of the social media-driven fashion era. It was a meeting of superhero designers.
Michele said the film signified a new dawn
The Gucci film culminated in a bliss-fest set in a Garden of Eden, where fairytale white horses, peacocks and cockatoos frolicked amongst models, who embraced and levitated like there was no tomorrow. Of course, as the soundtrack – Vitalic and David Shaw’s “Waiting for the Stars” – suggested, the point was quite the opposite. A massive part of Michele’s personal legacy at Gucci is his social conscience: the freedom of identity and sexuality, the freedom of choice, the climate, the environment. “The party is the planet. This is the party we want to attend,” he said. “To me it’s not only a film, it’s the dawn of something new. I think we will meet again in a new place.” While we keep our fingers crossed that that place will be a real-life venue with a real-life runway, it was nice to see Michele evoking the feeling of a classic fashion show. His format and the clarity of his collection were proof that fashion in its purest form feels a lot more democratic than we give it credit for. And in his stripped-down transition, Michele also injected his own take on Gucci with new life.
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