In May, when Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele announced the brand would be pulling out of Milan Fashion Week and rejecting seasonal shows for the foreseeable future, no one imagined the Italian brand would be starting up its own version. Yet, this week saw the launch of Gucci’s digital showcase — part fashion week, part film festival — that presents a series of seven short movies co-directed by Michele and Hollywood auteur Gus Van Sant, and available to watch online.
Altruistically perhaps, Gucci is sharing the platform with 15 independent young designers including Ahluwalia, Stefan Cooke, Bianca Saunders and Mowalola, who have created film shorts screened before and after each Gucci episode. By taking others on board it turns Gucci’s offering into something that competes with the online fashion weeks during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a big, bold statement, befitting a brand whose turnover reached €9.6bn in 2019, and it’s called Guccifest.
A film project is clever, given a hunger for at-home stimulus — Gucci’s are episodic, a film each day, keeping viewers coming back. “It was the first time we’ve done something like you’d find on Netflix,” said Van Sant, of Gucci’s films with their grand, overarching title Overture of Something That Never Ended. Each episode — four of which I have seen, before going to press — is like a disconnected snapshot, their only connection their protagonist, Italian actor, dancer and DJ Silvia Calderoni. The first episode is intimate and low key, seeing Calderoni stretching through yoga poses in a tulle Gucci jumpsuit and gold leather mules. In the second film, Calderoni visits a café, filled with lushly overdressed patrons. The third sees a visit to the post-office.
The films all embody Michele’s aesthetic, which is a little Seventies and a lot of vintage — the dodgy dubbing of dialogue is a deliberate nod to Italian films of the aforementioned period. They also have the ambiguous narratives and surreal dialogue that have marked many of Van Sant’s works: characters talk about eating flowers, and compare birds to beetroot. And they are each crammed with shots that linger over sumptuous Gucci clothes: even the queue waiting at that post-office affords Van Sant the opportunity to show ornate shoes, and logo-ed socks, and baroque birdcages (someone wants to mail one). The films all contain surreal moments, Calderoni, for example, selects a sequinned Gucci evening gown to wear to collect her post.
Images of the clothes that will ultimately be sold are released shortly after each film airs: “The fashion was part of the concept, and the casting was connected to the fashion,” said Van Sant. In his own movies costume hasn’t often played an important part — in Elephant (2003), Van Sant let his cast of new and non-professional actors wear their own wardrobe. Here, of course, everything is precisely chosen. However Gucci’s creative stance, which is often gender fluid, sexually ambivalent and youthful, also resonates with Van Sant’s oeuvre.
Audiences are also being lured via celebrity cameos from actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris, the musicians Florence Welch, Billie Eilish and Harry Styles, who appears in a deep telephone conversation with the 81-year-old Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, a neighbour of Michele. “I think when it comes to making art it’s about finding the thing that you always want to see, or listen to, that’s never been made,” says Styles, philosophically, wearing a sloganed pink Gucci T-shirt. “Fashion dresses humanity, art lays it bare,” responds Oliva — in Italian, from the post-office queue.
These are films undoubtedly in love with fashion. In the first, the sound of the fabric moving is intense, almost ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) in its soft rustling, and was specially recorded. “Gus was really fascinated with the idea — he really wanted people to feel the fabrics,” said Michele last Saturday, speaking from his apartment in Rome, the city where the films were made. “I was fascinated to get things from Gus, and he was fascinated to get things from me,” Michele said. “I am a fashion designer, but I feel myself like a costume designer, a director.” If Michele is a hybrid, these co-directed films feel so too, halfway between an art-house experiment and an advertising campaign — the latter not necessarily a bad thing.
Fashion films had, until the pandemic, often been perceived as cost-effective but emotionally lacklustre replacements to a live show. And just as watching live-streamed ballet and opera performances doesn’t have quite the same charge as experiencing the thing, a film can’t replicate the atmosphere of a catwalk show. That said, celebrity cameos within this selection adequately replicate the hysteria generated by starry front-rows — the episode featuring styles was broadcast at 10.30pm GMT, presumably to allow Styles’ considerable American fan base to watch. And, even with their obscure narratives, these films hold attention longer than a wordless filmed fashion show could.
Gucci hopes so. Of course, the ongoing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the fashion industry makes this a pivotal moment for the brand. Gucci’s recovery after the global devastating first half of 2020 has struggled along with its peers — a near-total shutdown of international tourism continues to drag on sales, which were down 12.1 per cent on a reported basis in the third quarter compared to the same period a year ago. E-commerce sales, however, are growing sharply, accounting for 12.6 per cent of Gucci’s retail sales over the quarter. So an online film series, driving traffic to your website, makes sense.
For now, Gucci has committed to showing outside the traditional show system — so too has Saint Laurent, also in the Kering group. It remains to be seen if the rest of the industry will scramble back to fashion shows as soon as they are able to, or if trials such as Gucci’s may show a new way for fashion to communicate. The feasibility of the menswear shows, currently scheduled for January in Milan and Paris, remains unclear. One tantalising question hangs: how do you show fashion, if you can’t stage a fashion show? Gucci’s is a compelling if not definitive answer.
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November 19, 2020 at 11:57PM
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With Guccifest, Gucci swaps shows for short films - Financial Times
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