He said the campaign, featuring Hari Nef, Petra Collins and Dakota Johnson walking through a field of wildflowers, proved conventional fashion world wisdom wrong by creating “an absolutely up-to-date female imagery.”
“If fashion and the fashion market want to continue to have a stage, there needs to be some sort of movement. That campaign, in a very gentle and very poetic way, gave space and voice to a world of very different femininity,” Michele said.
Likewise, Michele said the casting of only Black models in the 2017 campaign was at the time a breakthrough, noting that “things have changed in a dizzying and very fast way in the last year.”
The pandemic year has been a year of collaborations, including with North Face, and Ken Scott and Doraemon. A tie-up with Balenciaga will reach stores later this year. Gucci revenues rose 20 per cent to 2.16 million euros (S$3.49 million) in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period last year, Women’s Wear Daily reported.
Michele’s eclectic style, which has gone a long way toward mainstreaming genderless codes, especially for men, has created a sort of tribal following. Dubbed the Gucci Gang, Michele has fully embraced the power of that very distinct crowd during his pandemic year collections, which have been unveiled as digital presentations.
Those collections include this year’s Aria that ends with the runway cast converging dreamily in a garden, to Ouverture last November, with videos by Gus Van Sant featuring an Italian actress moving through a rarified Roman landscape with her Gucci tribe.
Michele said the brand’s real-life fans defy easy description, ranging in age “from 10 to 90.”
“It has happened that someone who could be my mother’s age greets me, or that Marina Cicogna (an 86-year-old film producer) tells me, ‘When I go in the store, I find crazy things,'” Michele said.
“It is strange because [we] also manage to dress someone who is 13 years old. Not only: Yesterday a young person stopped me who had a tattoo that said “Blind For Love,” and it was not the first,” Michele said, referring to one of the popular slogans that have adorned his creations.
“Evidently it was a strong detonation of something that already existed,” Michele said of his collections. “Fashion has the great capacity to interpret and to collect what is happening now …. to narrate the exact moment.”
