Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele handpicked the New York brand Collina Strada to be a part of his latest project. Today, designer Hillary Taymour and her collaborator Charlie Engman premiered their pre-fall 2021 collection via GucciFest, a virtual film festival headlined by a new miniseries co-directed by Gus Van Sant and Michele titled “Ouverture of Something That Never Ended” that showcases Gucci’s spring 2021 collection. Collina Strada was chosen to participate along with 14 other emerging labels from around the world.
The task at hand? Create, with total freedom as per Michele, an imaginative fashion film. Taymour and Engman decided to translate their eco-conscious, psychedelic world into a video game. The idea was to create an interactive extension to their spring 2021 video and collection, which featured a fantastical farm world filled with animated 3D flower models and moving natural landscapes.
For the video game, which they’re calling “Collinaland,” Taymour and Engman, along with multimedia artist Freeka Tet, dreamed up a farm world, an underwater world, a self-expressive world, and an ice world, all inhabited by plants and animals and, of course, video game characters: real models that the team digitally scanned so as to bring human beings into the virtual world, rather than create avatars from scratch. In the game, each character explores the digitized earth scenes with the ultimate goal of helping to battle climate change. The characters can pick up trash, put out fires, water cacti, and help build waterfall ice bridges for polar bears.
The Taymour-designed clothes they wear provide whimsical armor for tackling the global warming crisis: The models are dressed like cool, otherworldly warrior princesses in hand-drawn prints and pretty colors like pink and icy blue. Thanks to the partnership with Gucci, Taymour had the chance to explore more elevated techniques and fabrics, such as micro pleating, delicate embroidery, and ruffles that add an element of femme to her otherwise playful repertoire. The most impressive piece was the floral-print bodysuit with ruffle embroidery and peplum, but fantasy cargo pants with a bold ink blot print also deserve a shoutout, as does a hoodie reimagined with puff sleeves. A low-slung skirt and a cutout dress were accessorized with visible thongs—a cheeky nod to Tom Ford–era Gucci. There is certainly a new element of sexiness to the collection, but one of Taymour’s best qualities is that she never skews too far in one direction. Even with shiny new Gucci-provided materials, her point-of-view is still wonderfully out-there.
Taymour and Engman’s rather novel idea this season was to create clothes for customers and fans of the brands to interact with, without having to buy them. Yes, you read that right. They don’t want to keep putting more and more products into the world, contributing to our planet’s waste crisis. “We’re exploring different concepts around who a designer is and what a designer can be,” Taymour says. “We’re still artists and people are still looking at what we’re going to do next. But how do we create a different experience? There’s a way to create a more educational model or expressive model, rather than a product model.”
Is virtual fashion a viable new strategy for fashion brands? Could it be a legitimate revenue stream? It will be exciting to see what Taymour and Engman do next because as they’ve proven the last two seasons in Collinaworld, it’s game on and all systems go.
