Exquisite Gucci: the new chapter created by Alessandro Michele walked down the runway in a hall full of mirrors, a collection that in deforming mirrors brought together the stripes of Gucci with those of Adidas, showing the universal suit
Text by: Domenico Costantini
For the occasion of this long-awaited catwalk that marked the brand’s return in style at Milan Fashion Week, Alessandro Michele revealed the collaboration with the active sportswear brand, which had been rumoured for quite some time.
The Clover, along with a big ‘Gucci’, wrote in capital letters, and the three white stripes, appear almost everywhere in this collection: on sleeves, jackets pockets, on the maxi shoppers with a triangular cut, wraparound hats and gloves, we can find it on shoes, where one the heels we can find the iconic double Gucci ‘G’ made in gold and the Adidas symbol. To seal this unprecedented collaboration with the sports brand was the presence of former tennis player Stan Smith at the Milan fashion show, the man who gave his name to one of the most worn trainers model in the world.
Preceded by a keepsake invitation (a notebook with papers divided into three parts, reissuing the Fashion Wheel game), the défilé took place in a hall covered with mirrors.
The mirror metaphor is Alessandro Michele’s reading for his Gucci men’s and women’s collection for next autumn-winter. This reflective capacity would, in fact, allow us to approach the ontological status of the world, a way of seeing things exactly as we see them. But this perspective is not easy for Gucci’s creative director, who has always been averse to an exact vision of things. So the mirror opens up to his magical narrative, connecting his fantasy world with the transfiguration of reality. The garment is like a mirror, capable of reincarnating our presence in the world and reflecting it in a new dimension. “I celebrate clothes as true optical laboratories: machines capable of projecting fairy tales of metamorphosis and reincarnation into the world” . The Gucci collection is the portal to the dimension of genderlessness and timelessness, even with the famous Adidas stripes that define a specific kind of style (sportswear) the dress becomes universal.
So the look can only be metamorphic, in fact Alessandro Michele was inspired by a 1993 photo of Madonna wearing an Adidas dress by curator Laura Whitcomb‘s Label, the first fashion line ever to collaborate with the brand that the legendary pop star often wore.
Because it is the street first, according to Michele, that returns these “kaleidoscopic intersections” of which his fashion and powerful symbols such as the stripes are made, that unite the made in Italy luxury brand and the sports brand.
Similarly, fragments of memory from the 1980s enter the collection, starting with the soundtrack with Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat.
The strictness of men’s suits is now broken up by sportswear, capes for him and power suits for her, all in a democratic way because melting more in-between the two genders.
When Alessandro Michele did his first Gucci show, bringing young men down the runway wearing shirts with bows, many said it was a gender fluid collection, but that was a men’s collection, just like the one on the catwalk today. If the Gucci man is open to dialogue with the world of women, women have always liked to wear men’s clothes, hence the idea of returning to the catwalk in Milan after two years with a proposal essentially for him. All this filtered through a multiform mirror vaguely deformed that helps to declare how clothes are carriers of messages that shows and express our secret ‘us’ and our contradiction of being in this world.
