Gucci cuts a street in Los Angeles for the love of movies

Hollywood Boulevard was found cut off by police Tuesday night. Huge cannons of light pointed the way to the sky over Los Angeles and the lights of the theaters projected on a pink background a tortured entry from 1955 in Marilyn Monroe’s diary, which ends like this: “My body is every part of him.” Tourists, who habitually walk with their eyes fixed on the ground in search of the stars of the walk of fame, had been evicted by the outrageous staging of the latest Gucci show: a love song from its designer, the Roman Alessandro Michele, to the Californian city, to the cinema, to street fashion and to the history of a brand that this year celebrates its centenary.

Michele baptized Gucci Love parade your first event face-to-face after the interruption of the pandemic, because, he explained, his intention was to present something much larger than a parade. Attendees sat in director’s chairs emblazoned with the brand’s logo in a gigantic front row distributed between both sidewalks of the famous boulevard. The models came out of the interior of the Chinese Theater, the most beautiful icon of a street that is cut off to traffic every year for another great celebration: the Oscars.

Aesthetics spoke of guilty eroticism, classic Hollywood and its dark side. Of Elisabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra, of the classic image of Gucci as the hallmark of the jet-set or the trip cowboy hats from western movies made to gay clubs. And Michele once again played with the concepts of gender fluidity or inclusiveness that have made her work an always relevant contribution since she took over the house in 2015.

A strange music, of those that put a soundtrack of film noir to the traumas of the protagonist, he received the guests, among which there were celebrities such as the singers Billie Eilish and Miley Cyrus, actresses such as Gwyneth Paltrow or Dakota Johnson, and athletes such as the tennis player Serena Williams. Some, like Angelica Huston, were twofold: in mortal flesh and with their name imprinted in gold letters on the floor. Among the androgynous boys and girls who walked on Björk’s music, well-known faces also crept in, such as those of the actors Jared Leto or Macaulay Culkin, the writer Miranda July or the guitarist St. Vincent.

By then, Los Angeles, with its laid-back and paranoid incarnation of the American soul, seemed like the right place to celebrate the centennial of a brand that was born as the dream of Guccio Gucci, a self-made Florentine badass who started selling suitcases in 1921. leather for the traveling petty bourgeoisie in the first shop in Via Tornabuoni. If that family business has become one of the most ubiquitous brands on the planet, today owned by the Kering conglomerate, it is also because of the reception that this country and its movie stars and first ladies gave to the ambitions of his son Aldo, who, As early as 1953, he saw that the future of fashion was in its globalization and opened a business near Fifth Avenue in New York.

“When we think of America, we don’t immediately think of fashion,” Michele explained to the press after the show on the stage of the Chinese Theater. “But it is a tremendously influential country, thanks to the aesthetic projection of the image of its great social and political movements. By coming to Los Angeles, I wanted to pay tribute to this city that in a way feels like my home, and also to claim that fashion is as much or more in the streets than on the catwalks. My Hollywood, of course, is in the streets ”.

The choice of the place also responds to a childhood obsession. Those attending the parade received, within one of those folders that would archive criminal cases in a James Ellroy crime novel, a text in which Michelle explains that he was raised by a mother who worked in the Roman film industry as a production assistant. . And that dream factory (“Marilyn Monroe’s alabaster pallor and clear voice, Veronica Lake’s velvet hair, Rock Hudson’s alluring charm, and Kim Novak’s captivating transformative power”) provided “a fairy tale. Key to forging your personality. A personality that seems to be the great bet of success of its CEO, Marco Bizzarri, who walked his towering figure in a green velvet suit, and of its president, François Henri-Pinault: in five years, the occurrences of Michele Gucci’s revenue has tripled to € 9.6 billion in revenue generated in 2020.

That romance between the house and Hollywood is about to bear another profitable fruit with the premiere of the film. House of Gucci, which tells the story of ambition, greed and confrontations (including murder) of the family, which lost control of the firm in 1988. Directed by Ridley Scott, it features stars such as Lady Gaga, Adam Driver and Al Pacino. Its premiere is scheduled for November 24 in the United States and the first images seem like the masterpiece of someone concerned about turning the brand’s legacy into a phenomenal business.

Before the start of the parade, a clueless Scott explained to EL PAÍS that he was ap

To witness “the first fashion event” of his life, and that he feels “very satisfied” with the film, “a project of almost twenty years.” “I have decided to do it now because I finally found the right writer for the story,” added the director of Blade runner. The family, for their part, has shown displeasure with the cinematographic portrait of their misfortunes.

Michele, who already made a parade in the streets of New York six years ago, would later explain to the press that she had nothing to do with the film, and that she had only read “parts of the script”. “When they filmed in Rome I was also in contact with my friend Jared [Leto, que interpreta a Paolo Gucci, la oveja negra] and something was telling me. With film or without film, we always go back to the brand’s archive; it is a constant source of inspiration ”.

The latest collection, presented in April, was another proof of this, by successfully proposing the revision of some of the topics of the house, such as equestrian inspiration, based on a supposed chivalrous past of the Gucci, a crude invention of the patriarch, or the sexualized glamor with which Tom Ford made fashion history at the turn of the century. Another of Michele’s projects for this year of celebration has consisted in opening during Milan fashion week, in which he does not participate out of conviction, a second-hand virtual store with signature garments chosen by him and ready-made. by the company’s artisans.

Although this quirky creative who seems to manage year after year to connect with the spirit of spiritless times is not one to settle for just looking back. The Los Angeles show is also a reflection on the future of an industry hit hard by the pandemic. The event’s logistics itself shows that something has changed: only 42 journalists were able to attend the celebration in person (the rest followed virtually); they flew (invited by Gucci, like this correspondent) from different parts of the United States, since the borders with Europe have been closed for a year and a half (the ban will be lifted next week).

The event delves into a reconsideration proposed by Michele for some time of the show system, which several times a year put a global tribe of professionals trotting around the world from one fashion week to another. Concepts such as men’s and women’s clothing, Paris-Milan-New York and spring-summer and autumn-winter are a thing of the past for him. If just before the pandemic something like this seemed to lose meaning, Michelle stopped seeing it altogether during the confinement in her Roman apartment.

There he definitely embraced the idea of ​​creating experiences, such as a film festival with the collaboration of Gus Van Sant, outside the calendar and formats. Events capable of generating global impact, events such as this inordinate demonstration of love for cinema that cut one of the most emblematic streets of Los Angeles on Tuesday night