Keeping with the constant effort to adapt to the changing times and challenges of a remote-based world, designers are finding opportunities to make previously inaccessible features of the fashion industry available to the public. Runway shows and fashion week as an institution have historically been the epitome of exclusivity; for the highest-end shows, rarely can you attend unless you’re a celebrity, major buyer, or key figure in the industry. While recent years have seen designers’ efforts to publicize looks or create short clips from their shows, giving the public a peek into the largely unattainable world of luxury fashion, Gucci is taking this effort a step further with the creation of their recently announced GucciFest.
With GucciFest, the Italian fashion house turns an otherwise out-of-reach institution into something much more familiar and accessible to the public: content creation. The virtual event is a hybrid fashion show/film festival. For seven days, from November 16-22, Gucci will release short films created by their own team as well as films by fifteen young, emerging designers. All of the content will be available to stream on Youtube, Weibo, and of course the festival site itself.
The featured series of the festival will come directly from Gucci, in a 7-part mini series directed by Oscar-nominee Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele, the label’s creative director. The series, called Ouverture of Something That Never Ended, follows main-character Silvia Calderoni around Rome, where she goes about her day and encounters various celebrities including Billie Eilish and Harry Styles, among others, all of whom feature Michele’s newest collection. This festival and collection comes as part of Michele’s declaration to do away with the limiting conventional seasonality and frequency of collections expected to be released by designers.
In Notes from the Silence, excerpts from his personal diary during the Spring of 2020, Michele writes “I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call. We will meet just twice a year…I would like to leave behind the paraphernalia of leitmotifs that colonized our prior world: cruise, pre-fall, spring-summer, fall-winter. I think these are stale and underfed words.”
From this statement and the novelty of GucciFest as a concept, I’m not entirely sure what to expect out of the collection. I’m particularly interested to see what this “seasonless” approach will look like. Will Michele combine more traditionally wintry fabrics with lighter, summer styles? Or perhaps the collection will include a range of pieces appropriate for varying climates, exemplifying a sort of occasional and seasonal ambiguity in the looks. As it stands, luxury fashion already exceed normal levels of practicality, but will the abandonment of seasonalities make Michele’s new collection even more impractical for the majority of the world?
While I have questions about the collection itself, I believe the concept of the virtual festival is a refreshing and innovative creation to come out of a sector of the industry that can too often seem out-of-touch with the realities of the rest of the world. And if my curiosity about the new line doesn’t compel me to tune in next week, the Harry Styles cameo might be enough to convince me.
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