Fusing fashion, music, and film, Gucci mounts its first-ever virtual fashion film festival featuring superstars like Harry Styles and Billie Eilish.
Gucci has been famed for mounting many great spectacles just for its bi-annual fashion shows. However, living with the reality of the pandemic, live events were profoundly impacted. Thankfully, the fashion industry was born to be adept at the constantly changing times with new inventions in technology and science being presented every day.
So, with that in mind, Gucci thought it was just fitting to end this year by fully utilizing what existing in the digital world really looks like. There are no physical interactions and no models walking the runway; just letting the clothes be seen as it should be showcased to everyone.
Now that the chapter of stories in Epilogue has come to a close, Gucci’s Creative Director Alessandro Michele opted to mount its first-ever digital fashion film festival aptly called, GucciFest. By marrying fashion, music, and film, the storied fashion house gives us a mini-series divided into seven episodes. In it, they will feature its upcoming collection titled, OUVERTURE of Something that Never Ended.
But the primary highlight of this which is making everyone want to tune in is because Gucci tapped notable various actors, artists, and performers to be its cast. The lead role stars Silvia Calderoni in a surreal daily routine in the city, encountering a series of international talents and Friends of the House: Paul B. Preciado, Achille Bonito Oliva, Billie Eilish, Darius Khonsary, Lu Han, Jeremy O. Harris, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Arlo Parks, Harry Styles, Sasha Waltz, and Florence Welch.
Episode One
In its first episode titled At Home, Gucci visualizes gender and politics as depicted in gender-neutral eclectic vintage pieces that the mainstream media has never seen before. The story unfolds in an apartment in Rome following the morning routine of Silvia Calderoni that represents one’s start of the day that’s unbridled from the gaze and critique of the world. With an opening of buried self-intimacy, Silvia wakes up in a sheer lace jumpsuit and tulle lingerie set and proceeds to put on a pair of gold mules and glides through the apartment. Greeting a girl dressed in the new Gucci aesthetic, we also see a band playing a piece written by Kim Gordon specifically for the series and serves as a soundtrack to the rest of the episode. The band members are clad in coordinating tracksuits, denim bell-bottoms, and oversized retro sunglasses.
Following next is the scene that reveals what may be the purpose of the whole fashion film piece. Silvia turns on the television and Paul Preciado, gender theorist appears on the screen and speaks the language of love of the new era. Paul Preciado shares his journey as a transgender and the protest against the binary, the restricted, and societal limitations. “This revolution is going to be about love, about changing desires. It’s going to be about changing desires, of transforming desires, Silvia. And you know that,” says Preciado, breaking the third wall not only to Silvia, but also to us. Gucci speaks directly to us that the direction of Gucci Fest is to encourage a revolution based on love by accepting who we are without the need for any unnecessary explanation.
A foreshadowing of what Gucci’s plans are in creating a world of unapologetic self-expression, Therefore I Am by Billie Eilish plays in the background. For Silvia, it means letting go of society’s expectations of how to dress but for the fashion house, it’s the start of a new story for a brand that’s no longer constrained seasonality, spaces, or labels. The dress drops and as Eilish sings “I am worthy of my own existence, I am enough in my own identity, identification no longer exists,” Silvia along with the viewers is introduced to a world dressed in Gucci’s version of unconventionally beautiful.
The New Proposition
The seven episodes will be released daily through the course of the festival as an exclusive broadcast on YouTube Fashion, Weibo, Gucci YouTube and will be embedded on the dedicated site GucciFest.com, gradually revealing the new collection day by day.
As anticipated by Alessandro Michele last May on the occasion of the release of his manifesto Notes From the Silence, the presentation of the new collection is a joyful and irregular new tale, no longer constrained by the old notion of seasonality, closer to his expressive call and told by blending rules and genres, feeding on new spaces, linguistic codes, and communication platforms.
The full GucciFest will be broadcasted from November 16th to 22nd. You can either click here or scan the QR code below:
