Jul, 2020 | Fashion, Fashion Week, Milan

Gucci – Epilogue – Spring 2021

by Juan De la Concha

Epilogue: a piece of writing at the end of a work of literature, usually used to bring closure to the work. In some cases, the epilogue is used to allow the main character a chance to “speak freely”.

This is exactly what Alessandro Michele did during a 12-hour live stream that functioned as the closing act of his Trilogy of Love. Easily speaking about his inspiration and the experimentation behind his latest Gucci Epilogue SS21 collection, Michele bought us behind the mechanism of an advertising campaign.

We should remember that back in February the designer celebrated the magical ritual of the runway show as the highlight of the creative process by taking us behind the scenes and showing a community of emancipated spectators how these amazing events are shaped. By May, “The Ritual” advertising campaign was released and showed us how models shoot their own images making them co-creators of the images they starred. It was radical experimentation in which Michele got carried away by the idea that beauty can appear, unpredictable and wonderfully imperfect, through the absence of control.

For the last chapter of his “Trilogy of Love,” Alessandro Michele decided to show Gucci’s “Epilogue” collection on the members of his design team. This last movement goes around another short circuit. Clothing is worn by those who created it. Staging what they passionately imagined, a role reversal process once again.

“The designers with whom, every day, I share the daze of creation, will become the performers of a new story,” said Michele

The creative act becomes praxis of the exhibition. The interior projects outside and the invisible takes its shape, radiating through self-combustion. More than that. This time, the analysis of the mechanisms that regulate the fashion world intensified: For a whole day, anyone was able to investigate, thanks to properly arranged cameras inside the Palazzo Sacchetti, the process through which the design office embodied Gucci’s new advertising campaign.

Through this experiment, Gucci Epilogue pulled out the entrails of fashion once again, rejecting the concept of an ideal beauty represented by models. By making regular people the protagonists of this campaign, Michele also brought fashion closer to everyday life.

Although we continued to see the quintessential Gucci visual language we have got accustomed to – maximalist, bold, gender-fluid, contrasting pieces – we also saw a softer side, with cotton-candy-like shades in green, orange, and pink. Also present in the Gucci Epilogue SS21 collection, Donald Duck and Doraemon prints in outerwear and accessories and a lot of seventies vibes with corduroy flares, athletic bomber jackets, wide-leg jeans, oversized cardigans and floral patterns, part of an extended collaboration with Mantero’s Ken Scott.

Will Alessandro Michele continue this path? or will he stick to an idea he used during the live stream where he stated that change is essential, interesting and must be practiced? He said he can’t guarantee anything, and he doesn’t know what is going to happen – echoing the world’s sentiment during these times of uncertainty. We need to wait and hope for a new brighter day and a new prologue.

“In this sense, the epilogue that I deliver to you today really feels like an overture. A watershed that closes and opens at the same time, a threshold of a new beginning, from which we try to imagine our tomorrow”