Lead ImageGucci Autumn/Winter 2021Photography by Kevin Tachman. Unprecedented. A word that, however ubiquitous now, has come to define the past year. It also feels like an appropriate way to describe Gucci’s latest collection, revealed last week. Marking its 100th birthday, the collection, titled Aria, represented a fusion of the Italian fashion house’s codes and one of its French counterparts’, Balenciaga. Not a collaboration, as the brand has been keen to clarify, the collection was the first expression of creative director Alessandro Michele’s so-called “hacking lab” – an extension of his alchemic approach to fashion, whereby he will draw on not only different continents, cultures and centuries, as he has done throughout his tenure at Gucci, but different designers, too – in this instance Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s creative director, and Tom Ford, one of his predecessors at the brand. Plundering the “nonconformist rigour” of Gvasalia and the “sexual tension” of Ford, along with the silhouette of Marilyn Monroe and the glamour of old Hollywood, Aria felt new, exciting and, to use that word again, unprecedented. Unsurprisingly, the collection went viral.
