THE “UNREPEATABLE RITUAL” OF GUCCI’S FALL WINTER 2020 WOMAN COLLECTION REVEALS THE LITURGY OF FASHION BY ALESSANDRO MICHELE
Text by: Fiammetta Cesana
With the lights on Gucci’s Fall Winter 20 woman’s show, Alessandro Michele reveals himself like the prophet of a “gift” that fashion faithful are called to interpret. The creative director talks about a true sense of sacredness of the fashion show which, similar to a liturgical celebration, elevates us from the ordinary by intensifying our thoughts and feelings towards something inexplicable with mere rationality, something mystical, that everyone has free will of welcoming or rejecting it all. So we can be translators or traitors of the fashion prophecy.
“In a celebration that feeds off expectations, my though takes its shape and goes public. It blends obsessions and antigravity drives. It pauses over improbability. It caresses a nostalgia go the human, that others call imperfection. It sews, with the accuracy of love, the tiniest details of the scene in order to offer them to a community of interpreters.”
In the Gucci temple we are invited to come together in a prayer of love, carefulness, tolerance, and understanding. Here any stylistic inspiration, personality and aesthetic conscience finds a safe place to be and to evolve. At the core of this human liturgy is the acknowledgment that real beauty does not equate to perfection, but to liberty and depth of expression as well as to respect for one’s own uniqueness.
The garments worn by a procession of models – all different but united by the same faith of self-awareness and freedom of being themselves, fashionably and spiritually – can become through the eyes and hearts of the spectators an epiphanic moment, encouraging questions, distinct interpretations, and fighting against preconceptions and superficial judgements. Or, they can simply be refused if they do not find compassionate access in us.
“Even today, we are going to this ritual, which is sacred to me. A parade of steps will draw the space, like dongs in the temple. Mysterious tacks will take a solemn oath to the light. A score of notes will magnify prophecies impressed on moving bodies.”
Evocative and much strong are the words of Michele today, a confession of pure love for unfettered and sincere fashion; words that, like his own gift to us, can be accepted or not. But regardless of the behavior that each of us is free to take on what he describes as “an unrepeatable ritual”, one wonders if in a time made of appearances, one-hit-wonder idols, and misleading information, the message of fashion can actually represent a new protected haven for the deepening of knowledge, for breaking the barriers of superficiality and ignorance, and a harbinger of new and intense creative stimuli.
Despite today’s immediacy and accessibility of fashion world, its main goal seems to increasingly defend the quality of its own creation and the cultural and social message it carries out. For this reason, Alessandro Michele himself decides to show what’s actually behind the laborious event of “congregation” of the fashion show.
“May the miracle of skillful hands and holding breath come out of the shadows. May the collective intelligence that takes care of gestation be visible, as shivers rage on. May that wild and crazy hive that I made my home have a throne.”
