Fashion to die for at Gucci’s graveyard show
FIVE years ago, few labels bothered to put their cruise collections on a catwalk. Then an arms race broke out.
The big names now compete to outdo each other in exotic locations, and Gucci’s graveyard show – at the Roman cemetery in Arles, in the South of France – just sprinted into the lead.
Naked flames, dry ice, 114 models, a private after-show concert from Elton John … this was not done on the cheap.
As graveyards tend to, it provided a spine-tingling experience, reminiscent, as many of the veteran fashion journalists there remarked, of Alexander Mcqueen’s early shows, which were similarly fixated on the romance of necromancy.
It featured a cortege of spectacularly eccentric looks in varying degrees of weird – just what fashion needs to stop it atrophying into a fossilised heap of bland sportswear.
Most of it was at least partially obscured by clouds of dry ice, but that seems to be neither here nor there.
The pictures, transmitted across both social and traditional media, don’t remotely do the show justice. You had to be there. The fact that most of Gucci’s millions of fans couldn’t merely seems to stoke their appetites.