Gucci couldn't wait for the future a second longer. Frida Giannini left the company earlier than planned, and the menswear collection she was to present today was replaced in every last detail, right down to the model casting and the seating arrangement for the show. And all in five days. Scarcely credible, but if you ever needed proof of the ancient adage that where there's a will, there's a way, then here it was.
Inevitably, the droopy, androgynous languor of the show and its blurred gender divide (a curious concomitant of Prada's presentation last night) cast a very different spell from Giannini's recent collections. But there may actually have been a curious commonality in the fact that she was always inspired by musicians, and the clothes here also felt rooted in a subcultural music scene. It was as though someone had been paging through Rizzoli's recent tome devoted to the first 10 years of Another Man magazine, with the likes of Bobby Gillespie fearlessly carrying on the legacy of Mick 'n' Keef, wearing their girlfriends' chiffon and crepe, effortlessly easing snake hips into skinny trousers. "Visceral storytelling through fashion" was the declared intent of this collection, and the visceral clearly lived in looks that will undoubtedly enflame anyone who carries a torch for Gucci's jet-set legacy—something which, to her credit, Giannini managed to adapt to her own devices during her eight years as creative director. Take your pick from the stock-tied blouse in red chiffon, the slinky gilded top in red lace, or the eensy governess jacket with three-quarter sleeves. The shoes, one of the cornerstones of Gucci's accessories business, were pony sandals and mink-lined scuffs. The very deliberate sissiness seemed a glaringly obvious way to distance this collection from its immediate past.
But how on earth could that become the launchpad for the label's next incarnation? Maybe there were clues in the qualities the show notes isolated as definitive of the new Gucci: nonconformist, romantic, intellectual. Some of the models sported berets, spectacles, and long, skinny scarves. There was a duffel coat in a dazzling red. Right proper existential. Was it enough? The women's show in a few weeks will undoubtedly provide more of an answer to that question. For now, Alessandro Michele, Gucci's head accessories designer, took a bow surrounded by his team. It was a generous, democratic gesture, and it was as far from luxury's designer hauteur as those lank-tressed ephebes shuffling down the Gucci catwalk in their chiffon pussy bows.
