“I use the metaphor of the magical mirror to approach the phantasmagorical power of fashion.”
It’s one thing after another for Gucci these past few weeks. After making a comeback to Milan Fashion Week with its Exquisite collection, the Italian fashion house has launched a collaboration with Adidas as well as its star-studded Love Parade campaign.
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Presented at the Gucci Hub in Milan, the F/W 2022 line was done in a hall of mirrors to underscore the inspiration behind the pieces.
“In the 13th century, Vincent de Beauvais’ Speculum majus endorses the mirror as an essential knowledge instrument. Through the mirror, it is, in fact, possible to reach a transparent and exact comprehension of reality,” Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele beings to explain. “Its reflective capacity would make it possible to faithfully approach the ontological status of the world: from such a view, things would be exactly as we see them.”
Michele finds the perspective stifling, and proceeds to make the world remember the mirror’s other powers. “I’ve always been averse to the myth of the exact vision that inevitably ends up in freezing the immaginific power of the world,” he says. “For this reason, I wanted to restore another feature of the mirror. That is, building aberrations, enchantments, ghosts. I’m thinking about the magical mirrors described in the catoptrics treatises of the 1600s: mirrors set into precious wunderkammer, that behave like machines of expansion and transfiguration of reality.”
Through this theatrum catoptricum polydicticum, the clothes then offer themselves as makers of manifold. “Wearing them, means to cross a transformative threshold where we become something else; it means to be able to enhance and articulate in a different way our identity and our exhibiting potential,” Michelle says.
“Therefore, I use the metaphor of the magical mirror to approach the phantasmagorical power of fashion,” he continues. “A sacred power that radiates from the surface of the fabrics. And there I work, on this tactile surface, through cross references, alterations, loopholes and grafts. Juxtaposing worlds and meanings. Altering the stability of perception. Manipulating and magnifying the existing.”
Through these interventions, Michelle celebrates the clothes as real optical labs: magical machines that can give birth to fairy tales of metamorphosis and re-enchantment.
The adidas collaboration was introduced in the same presentation, with the German sportswear brand’s logos and markers playfully mixing with Gucci’s retro-chic aesthetic in everything from tailored green suits to Victorian silk dresses. Of course, sneakers are a focal point, particularly the Gazelle silhouette as it is painted with the Italian house’s prints and palette. No details yet have been release on when the line will be available.
The Gcci Love Parade campaign, meanwhile, is a continuation of last year’s presenation of the same name. Everyone from Jared Leto to Liu Wen, Miley Cyrus to Snoop Dogg are seen “portraying the modern myth of cinema through a sequence of obsessions and desires.”
