If you need plans this month, Gucci’s got you covered. In an unexpected turn of events, the fashion house announced that it’s launching a fashion and film festival called GucciFest. The virtual event will take place from Monday, November 16 through Sunday, November 22 — so you ought to mark your calendar accordingly.
As part of the Italian label’s first-ever digital festival, the team will present its new collection via a seven-part mini-series directed by Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele. The series is called Overture Of Something That Never Ended, which sounds a little something like, well, 2020.
Here’s what to expect: The film stars performer Silvia Calderoni as the actor goes about a “surreal daily routine in the city” of Rome. Along the way, Calderoni encounters a bunch of famous faces, including — but not limited to — Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, and Florence Welch. The program also generously includes short films from 15 independent young designers and their fashion collections.
GucciFest aligns with Alessandro Michele’s mission to reinvent Gucci’s strategy in never-before-seen ways. This past May, he announced his plan to break away from the traditional fashion mold. “I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call,” he wrote in the diary excerpt “The Sacred Power of Producing Reverberations.”
“We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story,” Michele continued. “Irregular, joyful, and absolutely free chapters, which will be written blending rules and genres, feeding on new spaces, linguistic codes, and communication platforms.”
“I feel the need to renew a bond, purifying the essential by getting rid of the unnecessary,” he said in another one of many diary entries. “I crave the authentic motive of a choice. The full set of reasons that set me on my way. I understand, as time went by, that these motives have different names and different intensities, but they inevitably gather around the same urgency: the possibility to tell.”
The label didn’t hold a fashion show this past September during Milan Fashion Week, but the world didn’t expect the show to go on. “I don’t think we will meet in person next time,” he speculated in an interview. “We have been shut down for a long time, so I don’t think we will have a regular calendar for September. I want to recover a new kind of time – real and practical – so we’ll choose another date.” The time is now.
You can participate in the event by streaming it on Gucci’s event website, the label’s YouTube channel, or Weibo.
