Florence, Italy
Epilogue is a closure in order to reopen.
A message about leaving behind fashion’s old rules, Epilogue is Alessandro Michele’s new collection for Gucci and at the same time his experiment.
The final chapter of Cucci’s Creative Director epic three-part subversive dialogue on where fashion is headed in the future.
I brought together different things, which represent the messy beauty that I have always sought: the chaos of beauty. What happens to the relation between reality and fiction when prying eyes sneak into the mechanisms of the production of an image? What happens to fashion, when the true goes back to being just a moment of the false?
Alessandro Michele, Gucci Creative Director
The whole campaign was shot during a twelve-hour live stream, so as to show what lies behind the making of a fashion ad.
Throughout the course of one day, the models were replaced by the Gucci design team, captured on camera while wearing the pieces from the Epilogue collection.
“Breaking the spell that forces my collaborators to passionately work on clothes they later have to abandon, I asked the team to wear them. And so we did a self-sufficient job, all inside our house, mixing things we had already done with things we were about to – overcoming the schemes of the time coherently with my idea of The Epilogue, the final resolution of a future that is largely present,” explained Alessandro Michele.
The lineup takes shape in silhouettes inspired by the 70s, with vivid colours and patterns—featuring oversized botanical prints and rainbow stripes sourced from Ken Scott’s archive, an American designer who lived in Milan in the 60s and 70s.
To convey the idea that pieces should be able to be worn always, and not just in fashion for one season, inside the 76 men’s and women’s looks are the creative director’s own design motifs from the past 5 years—the necktie blouse for his first collection, long cardigans, T-shirts tucked into jeans and bags Dionysus, Ophidia and Jackie 1961.
Alessandro Michele works, he admits, by subtracting, adding and moving around designs and shapes.
Inside the collection there is the idea of clothes of the bourgeoise designed to be worn by the kid on the street, the types of clothes worn by an elderly man, a memory of a maths teacher, along with a certain type of elegance that reminded the designer of his grandmother who lived in shirt dresses.
Other collaborations are also found: Donald Duck and his triplet nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, floral and paisley Liberty prints on men’s shoes, and another cartoon favourite of the designer, Doraemon printed like a comic strip on a GG motif tote.
Set within two contrasting Roman locations, the late-Mannerist Palazzo Sacchetti and the graffiti-covered Campo Boario area, the pictures bring together the Gucci design team, which worked with Alessandro Michele on the very same collection they are wearing.
Project: Gucci Epilogue Collection
Creative Director: Alessandro Michele
Art Director: Christopher Simmonds
Film Direction: Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo
Fashion Brand: Gucci
Photography: Alec Soth
