Fashionado is a fashion and lifestyle brand where readers indulge in a myriad of trending topics from the world of design, art and culinary. Via the FashionadoTV digital platform, Fashionado founder, E. Vincent Martinez, hosts interviews with celebrities, fashion designers, artists and industry professionals.
In his press notes, Michele made a connection between mirrors and fashion. “Clothes are capable of reflecting our image in an expanded and transfigured dimension… wearing them means to cross a transformative threshold where we become something else.” The liminal space is what turns him on, a point he made clear in his Gucci debut circa 2015.
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Alessandro Michele Photo: Courtesy of Gucci
Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, this much is clear: the fashion industry will forever be transformed by this global crisis. If our business is ever to feel normal again, it will be a new normal, with once grand department stores now shuttered or shrunken, and many designers and brands sadly gone for good. And the fashion show system? As glorious as individual shows can be, as a whole they’re unsustainable—excessive in terms of cost, time, and waste.
Over the last two weeks, designers, business leaders, and fashion’s governing bodies have begun setting out proposals for change. This Memorial Day weekend—precisely a year after his resort 2020 show at Rome’s Musei Capitolini, the acme of “the old way of doing things”—Gucci’s Alessandro Michele took to his Instagram account to tease some of the shifts he’s been considering. Extending over seven screens and including dated ruminations, the post dubbed “Notes from the Silence” suggests a new way forward for Gucci, one that rejects seasonal shows in favor of more personal expression. From May 2: “Now we know that too furious was our doing, too insidious was our ride… This is why I decided to build a new path... away from deadlines that the industry consolidated...and an excessive performativity that today really has no raison d’etre.” From May 3: “We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story. Irregular, joyful, and absolutely free chapters, which will be written blending rules and genres, feeding on new spaces, linguistic codes, and communication platforms.”
The designer hosted a “virtual gathering” to elaborate on his written statements. The technical challenges of simultaneous translation aside, he was poetic and optimistic. “We should not start over in the same way, breathless. It’s been too difficult. I want to start over with a breath of fresh air, with oxygen,” he shared. Some of the details remain to be worked out, but an outline of the next year or so is starting to take shape. Gucci’s two shows—down from the current five—are to be co-ed and scheduled in the autumn and the spring, however a September show is now unlikely. Michele hinted that there might not be enough time to be ready. Regarding the potential for a live audience at those shows, that, too, is in question pending government regulations about gathering in groups. Resort, one of the five big shows Gucci usually produces, will be shot instead on his studio assistants. The resulting digital show, to be presented at Milan Digital Fashion Week on July 17, will act as a sort of “epilogue” for the house’s old way of doing things.
At least some of the uncertainty about the future stems from the fact that Gucci is just one brand in a globe-spanning ecosystem. Michele urged an “open dialogue” with other houses and fashion’s governing bodies. “Rewiring” the system, to borrow the language of one of the industry proposals that emerged earlier this month, will require coordination on a massive scale, both externally and internally. For Gucci’s part, Michele indicated that much of the responsibility will fall to Marco Bizzarri, the company’s President and CEO. Bizzarri has Gucci’s customers to consider, but also its 40 million social media followers. “The fashion world has become a sort of Woodstock, open to a huge audience,” Michele said. “We’re followed by many people who’ve never entered our stores. The community outside the company is scattered all over the world.”
The unspoken message of all this may be that fashion shows are not the be all and end all of consumer engagement that their massive expense would seem to suggest they are. That said, Michele is committed to them. “I’m passionate about fashion shows, but maybe we can be open to seeing them in a different way. This is a suggestion we’re receiving from our current experience,” he added, nodding at the journalists on the virtual call. The dialogue will continue. Meanwhile, one of the brand’s first post-COVID innovations is the upcoming launch of a gender fluid shopping section on Gucci.com called Gucci Mx.
Source: Vogue Runway
FASHIONADO
Gucci was back in its week-opening spot today after a season as the Milan closer, and Alessandro Michele got things started with a major bang, staging a show that was as spectacular as it was intimate. A week ago in New York, the fashion show was declared over (a little prematurely, given Marc Jacobs’s own enlivening experience there). Michele is among our most sensitive designers. He feels the immense strain of producing these in-person events multiple times a year—he called them rituals in his postshow presser, and he absolutely intended the religious connotations—but he also understands how the internet age potentially threatens their future. Is it live, or is it Instagram?
Michele is insistent on the live experience, though he’s plenty savvy about social media too. He sent his show invitation via WhatsApp, an attention-grabbing, modern move that also happened to be a green alternative to the mountains of waste created by show production. A pair of WhatsApp’d images followed the invite; one was a snapshot of Michele doing his best #evachenpose, fingers covered in rings and nails painted an aqua blue, and the other was a close-up of a Gucci label stitched with the words Faconnier de Rêves. That’s “Dream Maker” to you and me.
In ringmaster—high priest?—mode, Michele staged a show in the round, exposing the behind-the-scenes action of the hair and makeup teams and the model dressers at work as they prepared the 60 cast members in their looks. There were shades of Unzipped (the 1995 fashion documentary) here, only in this instance the stage revolved, giving the audience full 360-degree views, and—the designer pointed out afterward—doing the same for the models and the backstage crew. “You were our show, and we were your show,” he said in his typically elliptical manner. Entry into the show space was through a backstage area too, and Michele was seen mingling in the crowd.
Inserting viewers in the action would seem a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, but Michele found himself connecting it with childhood. Last season he paid tribute to Gucci’s Tom Ford days; there were slip dresses, exposed bras, and ’70s-by-way-of-the-’90s pantsuits—the clothes that made Michele fall in love with fashion. Here, he looked further back, taking cues from “the perfection” of little girls’ clothes—pinafore dresses, school uniforms—and, it seemed, from the outfits of those little girls’ minders, nuns to nurses included.
He did something similar at his men’s outing last month; youth, for him, equates to “beauty and freedom.” For whom does it not? But today, as then, he kept the story lively. There were hippie nods, grunge allusions, and Moulin Rouge!–on-the-prairie gowns. And no, he didn’t bypass kink entirely. A patent leather harness was the accessory du jour.
As ever, the rule-breaking irreverence of his clothes was mirrored by the nontraditional beauties who wore them, but there seemed an inordinate number of overly thin models onstage this afternoon. Truer shape diversity would’ve made the communion of this Michele-orchestrated moment more powerful.
A voiceover at the start and end of the show in which the Italian director Federico Fellini celebrates the art of moviemaking illuminated Michele’s intentions today. “Fellini was talking about the sacredness of cinema and the rituals of filmgoing,” the designer explained. “We all belong to the same circus,” he continued, “and I really want to go on repeating this ritual.” Michele is a believer, and in turn, he makes believers of us too.
Source: Vogue
Fashionado
Glove your hands in Gucci jewelry with black inked fingertips as seen in the Gucci Cruise 2018 show in Florence. The dipped ink look extends down the fingers guided by fusing gold hardware and pearls. You can thank nail artist Jenny Longworth for this refreshing take on gothic glam.
Source marie claire
“But we couldn’t have Athens, so I went to the next big step in civilization, the Renaissance, so we came here to Florence, the fascinating metropolis of the past, the place which had the power of big money. Like,” he smiled, “Napa Valley now.” (A slip of the tongue: Silicon, we assume.) - Alessandro Michele, VOGUE
GUCCI resort 2018. See collection and full runway video.
Gucci's first menswear capsule collection with Net-A-Porter's MR PORTER is being launched by Alessandro Michele on May 18. The 43-piece collection will offer ready-to-wear garments, shoes and accessories. The capsule will provide something for each MR PORTER customer.
A variety of items are priced between $200 USD to $3,350 USD for Gucci's heavy embroidery, rich hues, animal motifs, bold patterns and plush textiles. Also, each piece from the capsule collection will contain a yellow Gucci label that is exclusive to this collection. To balance out the extravagant motifs and hues, try essential basics which can offer a more casual option.
Source HYPEBEAST
Fashionado is a fashion & lifestyle brand where readers indulge in a myriad of trending topics from the world of fashion, design, art and culinary. Via the FashionadoTV digital platform, Fashionado founder, E. Vincent Martinez, hosts interviews with celebrities, fashion designers, artists and industry professionals.
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