This afternoon’s edition of The Evening Standard—London’s metropolitan newspaper—lamented that all the “major” British fashion houses (Burberry aside) no longer show here. Tonight, Gucci stepped into the breach with an awesomely scaled cruise show held in the riverside Tate Modern gallery. And while the crowds outside might have been screaming for Lee Know from Stray Kids, to see Kate Moss and Alexa Chung down in the Tate’s Tanks space as we took our seats sparked a dreamily Proustian runway flashback to the London fashion scene’s pre-Brexit arcadia.
Gucci’s last show in London was in 2016, 21 days before that fateful national referendum decision to leave the European Union. Sabato De Sarno said in his release that he had been drawn to show here by his personal experience of London’s tolerance and outlook: “I owe a lot to this city, it has welcomed and listened to me.” The narrative was furthered by a then-teenage Guccio Gucci having worked in the Savoy hotel as a porter back in 1899, when he was inspired to found the company.
Not entirely unlike London post-Brexit, the Gucci brand post-De Sarno’s predecessor has been working through a slump. Only very recently have the newishly-installed designer’s first collections enjoyed widespread retail exposure now that Gucci’s global in-store rebranding is complete. Tonight De Sarno returned to Gucci’s city of inspirational origin to present a broadening of his creative canvas. The question was, would he be welcomed and listened to in London once again?
The opening phase nicely reflected Gucci’s put-together Tuscan principessa cutting loose a little now she’d landed in London. Mixed wash denim pants were worn beneath De Sarno’s strictly tailored outerwear pieces (martingale-belted cabans, double breasted jackets) that came deformalized through fabrication in matte brown suede. Pussy bow blouses floated from their necklines.
Pretty much all the shoes that came down the runway were flats in an offering that included horse-bit ballerinas with gridded rubber soles and the raised brothel creepers with branded metal segs we saw at menswear: liberation. And just as those creepers carried over from menswear, the jeans, a section of workwear popovers in poplin, and the oversized leather bombers looked like promising candidates for a spring 2025 redux back in Milan next month. Elsewhere, high collared patinated leather short coats played protagonists in a series of looks consisting of three-way near-pastel color stories, also defined by skirts and coordinated handbag/shopping bag duets.
Intricacy and ornament was worked into the collection via jeans that swished with a feathered halo of threaded hanging beads or a dégradé beaded embroidery of chamomile flowers. These flowers became an all-over pattern on later looks, where you could see through the vent in one skirt that the black-backed pattern on the outside was reflected in an equally worked yellow backed organza equivalent in the lining. Checks were blurred by their definition in more hand-applied hanging beads and studs.
At the finale, the yearning violin of De Sarno’s signature version of Mina’s anthem “Ancora” was mixed against Debbie Harry’s “ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh” from “Heart of Glass.” This was both to emphasize the revived Blondie bag (which Harry was in the audience to see), as well as signal an expansion of this designer’s initially rigorously technical universe.
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