Fashion houses usually do not ask reviewers to view the same show twice. For this resort collection, however, a double view was very much on the Gucci agenda. The reason for this would not be what we saw, but where we saw it from.
First time, at 4 p.m., we rolled up in the Gucci archive in Palazzo Settimanni. This originally 15th -century building is located in the southern Oltrarno side of Florence, and from 1953 the most important workshop of Gucci was. It housed the Gucci showroom when Tom Ford solved in the 1990s. And then, in 2021, to coincide with the centenary of Gucci, it was re -used by Alessandro Michele as the house archive.
Reviewers apart, the first show was almost exclusively for VICS: the municipality that stays the most faithful to the house. We mixed in what was once the Ford showroom and had the chance to check the displays of bamboo bags with the past. Upstairs were the silk cupboards that I remember that I saw four years ago, tucked away to create the creation of an elevated track floor whose surface was a spotted mirror.
The collection that we saw above seemed to a certain extent an amalgam of several phases of Gucci’s ready-made past. The leading spirit was the late Jet-Set Glamor from the mid-century that Ford identified in the DNA of the house, then transformed from Dusty to Must-Have during his time here. Around these fundamental feathered Chubbies and deep-Neckline sequins were further allusive brush strokes after the motives of his successor; The arches and maximalistic opulence of Michele, the appropriate tightness of Giannini, the net pattern and the male leather outerwear of the Sarno. More generally, there was a hyper-stylized, almost cinematic extensive articulation of female bourgeois decadence in the game that sometimes landed so close to the Seine as with the Arno.
After that first show, Gucci’s CEO Stefano Cantino remained on the runway. He revealed that Gucci’s incoming artistic director Demna van Verre was – as you would expect – are aware of its development, even if you were not yet formally in charge.
A few hours later, after a short splash of rain that Gucci Staff employees gave the tickles, we returned for the second show. This was much more on public: an audience that included Paul Mescal, Viola Davis, Julia Garner and Jeff Goldblum, junk in the archive. Instead of joining them, however, we turned out to be the second time around reviewers in Piazza Santo Spirito, a public square around the corner. This is why that passing rain had been so worrying: there were also dozens of Gucci staff in the bars and cafés adjacent to the square, and a healthy crowd of Florentine fashion fans who watched from the basilica. First we heard the Ennio Morricone soundtrack from the archive, before the models around the corner of Via delle Caldaie appeared, about the pit flagstones and around the bubbling fountain.
In the end, our double exposure was to demonstrate Gucci’s intention to bring his archive to life. This collection designed by the studio worked to insert the past of Gucci into the present and thus to see the future, also to be seen, also the future.