By disrupting men’s and women’s clothing and parading the mid-season collections, the Italian luxury brand will reduce the number of annual shows from five to two.
In a series of journal entries entitled “Notes from the silence”, published on Michele’s Instagram account on Sunday, the designer said that he intended “to abandon the worn ritual of seasonality and shows” to “regain a new cadence”.
“We will meet only twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story,” he wrote, adding: “I would like to leave behind the paraphernalia of the leitmotives that colonized our previous world: cruise, pre-autumn, spring -summer, autumn-winter. I think these are flawed and undervalued words. “
The main brands conventionally followed a frenetic program of separate events for men and women on the catwalk during the autumn-winter and spring-summer fashion weeks in New York, Paris, London and Milan. Many also organize additional unique and pre-fall “cruise” shows.
But the coronavirus pandemic has intensified existing concerns about the environmental and economic sustainability of the jet-setting program and the consumption cycles it encourages.
Michele, who worked with Fendi before joining Gucci as a bag designer in 2002, said his new strategy emerged while confined to his home during the blockade. His goal of “purifying the essential by eliminating the superfluous” is linked to concerns about the environmental footprint of the fashion industry, he explained.
The designer Alessandro Michele at the Gucci Spring-Summer 2020 fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week Credit: Victor Boyko / Getty Images Europe / Getty Images for Gucci
“Our reckless actions have burned down the house we live in,” says one of the journal entries. “We conceived ourselves as separate from nature, we felt cunning and omnipotent. We usurped nature, dominated and hurt it.”
On Monday Michele confirmed the move during a video press conference, in which he claimed that the decision was approved by Gucci’s managing director Marco Bizzarri.
Reverse tide
Numerous other luxury labels have reported changes to their future calendars amid the coronavirus pandemic, albeit in less demanding terms than Gucci.
Gucci Fall-Winter 2020 show during Milan Fashion Week.
Similarly, the #rewiringfashion initiative called for the combination of men’s and women’s fashion weeks, claiming that the shows are staged “too far ahead” of the release of the articles. The campaign, which was launched by the sector magazine Business of Fashion, proposes to move the spring-summer fashion weeks to January and February and the autumn-winter to June.
Gucci Fall-Winter 2020 show during Milan Fashion Week.
“Together, we strongly advise designers to focus on no more than two major collections per year,” read the note. “We firmly believe that this can provide our talents the time necessary to reconnect with the creativity and craftsmanship that make our field so unique in the first place. A slower pace also offers the opportunity to reduce stress levels of designers and their teams, which in turn will have a positive effect on the general well-being of the sector “.
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