Fashion can drive you crazy for all the wrong reasons: the stress of churning out a collection after the other can be unbearable for a designer, but following what happens in the industry can be stressful as well. Think, for example, about critics (well, the very few ones left...) reporting on a daily basis from the runway shows during fashion month. There are also other forms of fashion-related insanity like super obsessed fashionistas who follow all the latest trends and buy too many clothes and accessories.
And so it happened that Gucci's show, that took place during Milan Fashion Week, opened with over 20 models on a conveyor belt runway surrounded by white plastic waiting room-style chairs of the sort you may find in a hospital. They all had a blank expression on their faces and wore what looked like reinvented versions of straitjackets.
There were beige or white shirts, dresses, coats, jackets, but the starting point was always the straigtjacket used to restrain adult patients in psychiatric hospitals between the 1930s and the 1960s.
During the runway one of the models, Ayesha Tan Jones (YaYa Bones), raised their palms revealing the message "Mental Health Is Not Fashion". The non-binary artist and musician explained on Instagram they didn't feel at ease with the straitjacket part of the runway, and wrote: "As an artist and model who has experienced my own struggles with mental health, as well as (having) family members and loved ones who have been affected by depression, anxiety, bipolar and schizophrenia, it is hurtful and insensitive for a major fashion house such as Gucci to use this imagery as a concept for a fleeting fashion moment (…) It is in bad taste for Gucci to use the imagery of straight jackets and outfits alluding to mental patients, while being rolled out on a conveyor belt as if a piece of factory meat. Presenting these struggles as props for selling clothes in today's capitalist climate is vulgar, unimaginative and offensive to the millions of people around the world affected by these issues."
Ayesha Tan Jones also added she had decided to donate all the fee from the show (and a few of the models on the runway pledged to donate a portion of their fee) to mental health charities.
Gucci's press office explained that the model's protest was not planned, highlighted the garments would not go into production and would not be on sale, and added that the brand's creative director Alessandro Michele didn't mean to offend anybody.
That part of the show, Michele claimed, was inspired by uniforms hinting at restrictions imposed by society on somebody's personal expression. The straitjacket was conceived by Michele as "the highest type of uniform", something that blocks and constrains the wearer turning them into an anonymous human being (the show notes quoted French philosopher Michel Foucault and also highlighted the importance of resisting subjugation). Gucci's Instagram page also explained that these blank-styled clothes represented "how through fashion, power is exercised over life, to eliminate self-expression. This power prescribes social norms, classifying and curbing identity".
According to the Instagram statement, the collection that followed, was supposed to "allow people to walk through fields of possibilities, cultivate beauty, make diversity sacrosanct and celebrate the self in expression and identity."
The straitjacket section was indeed separated by a moment of darkness and then the real S/S 20 designs arrived on the runway to prove that constraints were lifted and that creativity could finally take place.
Though Michele is still a maximalist at heart he tried to go down a different route for the S/S 20 collection, injecting a dose of sex into his librarian chic designs.
Black prevailed, prints almost disappeared, the silhouettes were suspended between the '70s and the '90s, there were subtle hints at Prada and Michele at times homaged Tom Ford.
Lace slip dresses with plunging necklines, and high-slit skirts matched with kinky thigh vinyl boots and latex opera gloves were accompanied by cat o' nine tails and riding crops, to hint at the company's heritage and subvert it in an S&M key, reducing a functional sport accessory into a sexual object.
There were still classic Alessandro Michele moments and the accessory section included sparkly butterfly brooches, eyeglasses with thick chain holders, mismatched trainers, and anklets and bracelets that looked like bullet casings but contained instead rows of lipsticks (the best way to advertise Gucci's beauty line). Yet, as a whole, things were a bit toned down.
Bags, jackets, sleeve cuffs and trouser hems incorporated slogans such as "Gucci Orgasmique" and "Gucci Eterotopia" (from Michel Foucault - "heterotopia" describes cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow "other", so ships, cemeteries, bars, brothels, prisons, gardens of antiquity, fairs and many more).
But while Michele's maximalist nerds gone sexy went down well with the media, that initial One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest moment remained questionable.
It is surprising that, even though the company recently hired a Global Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (Renée Tirado), it still comes up with dubious messages (remember the previous faux pas, the balaclava jumper with a cut-out mouth and red lips that summoned up blackface imagery and that was pulled immediately from stores?). Besides, the explanation provided on Instagram about society controlling the individual simply doesn't work – you may indeed argue that fashion controls the individual as well.
Society may impose a role on each of us, but fashion puts pressures, tells us that we should go for this trend, that particular brand, those shoes and bags to achieve status or to conform with the rest of the fashion tribe. It is indeed difficult to read behind those straitjackets an invitation to dare to be whoever you want to be in a world of copies, when brands and fashion houses fascistically impose certain trends and order us to follow them.
In many ways fashion erases our identities and no brand - Gucci included - can be the antidote because each and everyone of them tries to overimpose their logo on our personalities (often influencers and models following a particular brands call themselves family or army and, by pledging their loyalty to a particular brand for financial reasons, wear an invisible uniform).
And while we can all choose by ourselves if we want to escape the constraints of fashion by buying luxury clothes or by making our own garments or wearing only vintage or second-hand clothes, Gucci should have instead escaped controversy by leaving an instrument of torture such as the straitjacket safely confined to a museum.
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