August 25, 2022 |
Gucci is like a highly imaginative fictional machine endlessly disseminating fantasy. You need only glance at its collections across recent seasons to comprehend this interpretation – recall, for example, last year’s extravaganza that reminisced upon old Hollywood. Always inhabiting a self-created cinematic universe, this August for its out-of-the-box advertising campaign called Exquisite, the maison pays tribute to the late American film director, producer, screenwriter and photographer, Stanley Kubrick.
Alessandro Michele describes the visionary filmmaker as, “a real sculptor of genres” and, “the cross-genre director”, when articulating the ways in which he felt profoundly inspired watching Kubrick’s work. He writes, “Kubrick’s experimental drive goes beyond any possible categorization. Every film, in fact, digests the manifold souls where dystopia meets parody, drama becomes human comedy, horror looks like a psycho-philosophic treatise, the feeling of truth evolves into the uncanny.” As an act of love, Michele reinhabits and reinterprets some of Kubrick’s greatest films; disassembling, blending, grafting and reassembling them again to catch his clothing in the crosshairs of the past and the present. The result is glamorous and macabre at once, forbidden and romantic like Lolita with the aged aesthetics of Kubrick’s most beautiful optical creations. Like something straight off of the 1970s silver screen – but rendered in high definition – Michele carries forward his usual creative praxis, furthering his bid to seamlessly mingle high and low cultures.
Depicted, an Adidas collab dress appears like a latter-day victorian costume within a scene from Barry Lyndon, cunning and all; gothic garms infiltrate the isolation and insanity of The Shining; a venus in fur, embellished with sensual bourgeois pearls appears like an enigma born from the erotisism and mystery of Eyes Wide Shut; A Clockwork Orange’s fetishism encroaches upon the savage style and eccentric inky eyeliner of the lads enframed; a dreamy evening dress overflowing with soft tulle ruching pervades the aseptic and dystopian vessel and metaphysical oddity that is the Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In the campaign notes Alessandro Michele declared that he’s always been charmed by cinema: “For its power to tell stories that can probe human adventure and its drift. For its visionary power to dig up in the real, making it vertiginously imaginative and questionable.” He goes on to express that when it comes to his collections, he has always visualised and conceptualised them as though they’re films, “able to convey a cinematography of the present.”
A dear friend of Michele, the acclaimed costume designer Milena Canonero and the original artist to have worked on the films aforementioned, returned to her roots to recreate and replicate the featured films’ original costumes. The 76-year-old accepted Michele’s invitation to go back over the scenes that hailed her as undisputed treasure in the history of her field.
Photography by Mert & Marcus. 2001: A Space Odyssey and all related characters and elements © & ™ Turner Entertainment Co. A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining and all related characters and elements © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (s22).
