As a reflection of fashion’s shifting aspirations, the remarkable overhaul of Italian mega-brand Gucci is quite the case study.
Just four years ago, Gucci traded on luxury, sex, glamour and bling. Now, it is enjoying spectacular commercial success with an ethos so different, and so highfalutin, that creative director Alessandro Michele’s post-show press conference feels like an advanced seminar in philosophy.
This season – reclining on a blush pink velvet sofa set against a backdrop of panelled screens covered with delicate paintings of Herons – Michele referred to “post-humanism”, “the ultra-natural” and “hybridisation” while explaining his collection.
Gucci shuns glamour and sex for philosophy and severed heads https://t.co/ddun6jccGI
— The Guardian (@guardian) February 21, 2018
His primary source, he said, was Donna Haraway’s 1984 A Cyborg Manifesto, an essay questioning the boundaries between humans, animals and machines.
“It talks about the relationship between being and becoming; about what we are and what we want to become,” he said, adding: “We are the Doctor Frankenstein of our lives.” Foucauldian theories about the dangers of categorisation, and about identity “as a device of bio-political control” were quoted in notes distributed at the show.
On the catwalk, these ideas coalesced into the wonkiest Gucci show yet. The set was designed to look like an operating theatre, its PVC-coated floors and walls painted municipal blue and waiting room green. There were real surgical beds, with circular operating lights hanging over them ominously.
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