During the Coronavirus emergency Gucci's Creative Director Alessandro Michele has been pondering a lot about the future of fashion and has been posting messages on Instagram in which he shared his thoughts. In more than one message he highlighted his need to reconnect with the main reasons that inspired him to join the fashion industry and at the beginning of May he made an announcement – there will be just two shows a year for Gucci from now on.
"I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call. We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story," Michele stated. "I would like to leave behind the paraphernalia of leitmotifs that colonized our prior world: cruise, pre-fall, spring-summer, fall-winter. I think these are stale and underfed words (…) Containers that progressively detached themselves from the life that generated them, losing touch with reality."
Michele is certainly not the first fashion designer who has been feeling like this (nor he will be the last one…). You can also bet that Gucci will not be the only fashion house to restructure its fashion shows after this pandemic will be over. But in a post-Coronavirus world there may be other things that will have to change, for example designers borrowing and copying each other.
In the last few years we have seen many houses misbehaving in different ways: remember for example the case of Fair Isle-based knitwear designer Mati Ventrillon who saw some of her designs reappearing in a Chanel's Metiers d'Art collection in 2015. This wasn't a coincidence when it was revealed that two members of Chanel's staff visited Fair Isle and bought some of her stock garments "for research".
Sending team members or interns around scouting for ideas is not an unheard of practice and you wonder if this is also what happened with the headdresses used to accompany Rick Owens' S/S 2020 collection.
Reminiscent of the nemes donned by Egyptian pharaohs, but recreated in shiny black or silver metal, the pieces called to mind the headgear in Junya Watanabe's A/W 2016 collection, that was inspired by origami and was created by Tomihiro Kono.
You wonder if Owens or somebody else in his team actually saw these pieces or the sections relating to them in Tomihiro Kono's volume Head Prop. Maybe? Or is this just a coincidence, a parallelism resulting from a casual analogy? We will never know, but maybe the answer is not even important at the moment.
What's important now is that in future we will see a slower approach to design that will allow creative minds to come up with genuinely innovative ideas (as opposed to borrowed and remixed ones…) or to find the humbleness to turn to other professionals, work with them and credit them. Surely the broken fashion system can be fixed and maybe coming up with a more compact fashion calendar will allow the system to regain a more human rhythm once and for all.
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