#GucciTheRitual is back for round two — and it’s best enjoyed at home.
Three months after the luxury brand’s fall 2020 collection debuted, Gucci launched its latest campaign, with digital imagery and a video. The 16-second clip shows a lineup of models dancing and singing to “Alright” by Supergrass in their respective homes — all while decked out in head-to-toe Gucci. Right before the video fades out, Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele takes the screen and joins in.
The campaign imagery shows models going about their routines in quarantine: brushing their teeth, concocting homemade face masks, and taking advantage of any and every socially distant outdoor space. Of course, no Gucci campaign would be complete without animals, so models invited their feathered friends, from chickens to birds, to join the at-home shoot. According to Interview, Michele called the campaign his “most authentic yet,” saying that “the extravagant hyper-naturalism that [he has] always tried to depict, now emerges even more authentically and more amazingly.”
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“The overturning, in fact, creates a paradoxical effect: loosening control produced a narration that seems to overcome, in intensity, my own ability to build fiction,” he told the magazine. “I am thankful for this imaginative experimentation because it restored the power of a dream: mine.”
Since Michele took the helm in 2015, he has brought the Milan-based luxury brand into the modern-day, spearheading the maximalist fashion movement after years of minimal dominance. Since then, he has launched campaigns ranging in inspiration from photographs of Malick Sidibé, who captured youth culture in Africa in the ‘60s and ‘70s, (pre-fall ‘17) to old Hollywood glamour (spring ‘19).
For the most recent the fall ‘20 runway show last February, Michele upturned the fashion show structure completely. The show, titled “The Ritual,” gave the audience the chance to see what happens behind the scenes at a fashion show. Behind a transparent screen, models could be seen getting dressed in their final looks. Once they were fully dressed, each model took their spot on the edge of the rotating stage. In the show notes, Michele explained his reasoning for the flipped format, saying: “There’s something though, in this ceremony, that usually stays buried: the struggle of the parturient that accompanies the tremble of creation; the mother’s womb where poetry blooms, from shape to shape. Therefore, I decided to unveil what lies behind the curtains. May the miracle of skilful hands and holding breath come out of the shadows."
See a stylised version of our lives in quarantine in the Gucci campaign, above.