Gucci: still making kooky covetable
It can’t be a coincidence that the most successful fashion brand on the block right now, the one with queues round the block some weekends, is one that presents a picture of us as slightly (or maybe not so slightly) at odds with the world.
That point really came home to me earlier this week when I went to see the new Gucci resort collection (which reaches stores in November) in Florence, its home. What a slyly interesting and subversive designer Alessandro Michele, its creative director, is – besides being someone who churns out crazily commercial product after product.
Margot, the wealthy, impeccably bobbed nut-job from Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, remains a key muse, but she’s been hanging out with the aristocratic bag ladies from Grey Gardens. It’s a safe bet she’s stopped seeing her therapist. That’s what makes her compelling. If she were simply nostalgic or merely eclectic, we’d move on. But while Michele’s kooks are self-evidently rich (they’re wearing Gucci, after all), they’ve become stranger and more ill at ease with their surroundings with every passing season.
This time the surroundings were Florence’s Palazzo Pitti. The models wound their way past 17th-century portraits by Carlo Dolci and Langetti, their gently flushed cheeks and glistening eyelids a manicured reflection of the 16th-century beauties on the walls. On they trudged (at Balenciaga, models stomp; at Valentino they waft; Gucci is definitely a care-ridden trudge) past the doll-like Chinese influencers in the front row, whose devotion to selfie – portraits may yet turn out to be its own kind of art form.
You couldn’t help but enjoy the parallels between Renaissance art and 21st-
century fashion. “Look at the boobs on that,” said one editor-in-chief as she surveyed an implausibly pert pair in oils. “And to think silicone was still 600 years in the future”.
Renaissance subjects didn’t need plastic surgery to achieve pert breasts. The sheer quantity and quality of male models willing to pose as women – the reputation of female models being akin with that of prostitutes in 1570 – saw to that. Michele seemed fantastically prophetic when he dressed his male models in women’s clothes, and vice versa, back in early 2015, but Botticelli was even earlier to the gender-fluid party.
Another thing that became clear during this leviathan of a collection: while Michele’s focus on unfettered maximalism doesn’t change, each season brings more layers of odd allusions and dissonant moods that keep everyone coming back for more. A feather-haired boy/ girl in an embroidered lumberjack shirt and gold laurel leaf crown, a Titian-haired, brutally short-fringed page boy/ girl in a Tudor-style, brocaded mini dress emblazoned with the word “Guccy” ( a wink to the more carelessly produced fakes out there?), and a further 113 looks doused with self-referential nods and winks to Michele’s own recent work at the house, including dresses printed with looks from previous collections … even the most blasé of observers would have to concede this is all quite weird. Which makes it so appealing.