Gucci Aria Celebrates 100 years of Glam With Some Fashion Hacking

In celebration of the Italian house's 100-year anniversary, Gucci’s latest collection “Aria” by the label’s creative director Alessandro Michele is the perfect mix of Gucci’s history, influences from Tom Ford and from Balenciaga's creative director Demna Gvasalia.

Seeing Balenciaga’s print on a Gucci suit looks like a magic trick. Alessandro Michele likes to surprise us. He also likes the way Demna Gvasalia awakened the Balenciaga house with his anti-conformist style and out-of-this-world volumes and cuts. He therefore decided, after negotiations with the latter (whose label also belongs to Kering), to “borrow” some of the pieces from his first collection for Balenciaga - which Michele had particularly liked. He thus integrates them in this full-of-surprises collection, celebrating 100 years of the Gucci house.

The event itself created a buzz, but this collection is definitely much more than just fun, unique and original.

To present the collection, Alessandro Michele worked with the director Floria Sigismondi (who directed video clips of Rihanna, David Bowie, Dua Lipa, Justin Timberlake) for a small film featuring a group of girls and boys walking in the long corridor of an imaginary club, “Le Savoy”, which walls are studded with flashes and cameras reminiscent of the paparazzi of the golden age of Italian and Hollywood cinema. The Savoy is also the London hotel where Guccio Gucci worked as a liftboy in his youth. Alessandro Michele wanted to celebrate both the founder of the house and the very rich universe of the label.

Gucci: A hacking laboratory

"I am pursuing a poetry of the illegitimate," Michele said. “"Gucci becomes for me a hacking lab, made of incursions and metamorphoses. I have plundered the non-conformist rigor of Demna Gvasalia and the sexual tension of Tom Ford; I have lingered over the anthropological implications of what shines, working on the brightness of fabrics; I have celebrated the equestrian world of Gucci transfiguring it into a fetish cosmogony; I have sublimated Marilyn Monroe’s silhouette and old Hollywood’s glamour; I sabotaged the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie and the codes of men’s tailoring." When we see the models walk this bright corridor, we especially remember this desire: that of getting dressed to (finally) go out, indulge ourselves with perfectly cut loose suits, ultra-glamorous pencil skirts worn with chic underwear, long flowing dresses enhanced with leather corsets, coats and capes, feathers, logos, monograms, metallic jewels, simply everything that celebrates smart fashion.

With Alessandro Michele, Gucci is a centenary girl who flirts this season with a modern and borderline bourgeois allure. A sophisticated, whimsical and sexy woman – a helmet on her head and riding boots on her feet - who is undoubtedly tired of hanging out in tracksuits or cozy pajamas and who now takes the time to come up with a perfectly balanced magnetic look. Leaving this festive club, girls and boys find themselves in a poetic garden filled with horses and white parrots. A post-pandemic heaven.