Gucci. Spring 2023 - Milan Fashion Week

(Images:  Gucci 2022)

Alessandro Michele returns with his metaphysical and socially inspired aesthetics for Gucci's Spring 2023 collection, leaving off from his occultist driven 'Cosmogonies' collection in May of this year, held at the mystical Promenade des Alycamps in Arles, Italy.  Michele's latest styles for the famed fashion house, have played on his reworked semantics titled "Welcome to Twinsburg" further accentuating Michele's eccentric inclinations, by having sets of twin models walk, towards the end of the show, in tandem at Milan Fashion week.

As the 2020 pandemic seemly has been abated by mass vaccinations, particularly rich Western countries at the expense of the poorer countries falling far behind in their vaccination rates.  The question is; have we all reached herd immunity?  When a new mutation or virus could be lurking around the corner.   Yet, the pandemic did show up the worst of humanity, from feverishly wanting to return back to dance festivals to right wing commenters calling it all a left wing conspiracy.    It was, globally the millions that perished from the virus, which was an extraordinary loss of life that many, unless touched by it in someway, has been dismissed as returning back to normal.   Michele was of the few fashion designers that wrote an open letter in 2020 during the global lockdowns, requesting that we should look at the pandemic as a time of reflection for our selves.  But, with Fashion Weeks retuning to full capacity and its renown excesses, you could be forgiven in thinking that Michele's heartfulness was reflective of that year and it all was just a blip in our tumultuous time line.

And in 2022 Michele has once again reminded us within his subtilty of crafting the Spring 2023 collection, that society has become a lot more unstable rather than any passing glitch, with Michele's own country Italy about to be ruled by an extreme right wing government, for the first time since Mussolini.   America is still grappling with the shadow of Trump, with far right conservatism attempting to control the reproduction  rights of women, ramping up prejudices against sexual choices.  Climate change deniers and Putin's invasion of Ukraine, to which Russia would much prefer a more sympathetic world to their reasons of invading a sovereign country.  Yes, we are all living in a very dangerous time for humanity.

At 68 pieces in total, fusing refined elements of the counter/pop culture eras of the 1970's and early 1980's, to which Michele has always been able to conjoin into a unique template for Gucci.  Michele's twins, seen as their dual identity of each other, which Michele has respectfully aligned in such a way of therapy to love the other self.  Walk hand in hand, styled from Michele's idealism of the dandy, while the satin dresses idolize the liberated feminine.   The collection does, as you would expect, represent the freedom of expression and sexual liberation, that were the gay countercultures of the 1970's, who fought to be acknowledged and treated equally.   Noted with the FUORI! print, which was an Italian gay and lesbian magazine that was prolific in the late 1970's as benchmark for the Italian gay rights movements.  

However, there is an overall seriousness to Michele's latest array, it does feel a lot more focused in his portraying or at least homage to the countercultures of yesteryear, that for the most part do not exist in out current timeline, sans drawing from the 70's and 80's as an inspiration.  However, Michele's urgency in duplicating those rebellious movements of the last forty years, does feel like a simulacrum of ideas, thus in turn makes the collection feel, paradoxically a lot more confined and even restrained.  

Undoubtedly, the sweet spot of that said era, which was between the Pill and AIDS, was more of a hedonistic period born out of the 1960's backlash against 1950's family values and conservatism   Living with the fear that thermalnuclear war could have broken out at any point.  The ultimate sociological question has to be asked; to what direction is our society heading in?  When it could be argued that we have indeed gone backwards, embracing the conservative values of the 1950's while trying to imprint in a feigned way, societal inclusions, to be appropriated into a digital market place.

Maybe we are all at fault in someway and god has rolled the dice to many times.  Maybe this is the end.