Each season creative director Alessandro Michele shifts our perspectives on what it means to create fantasies in fashion, and the Gucci Beloved Line of bags serve as case studies on how the House forges a connection between the past, the present, and the future.
Having assumed a position that demands a unified creative vision for Gucci, creative director Alessandro Michele shifts our perspectives on what it means to create fantasies in fashion each season. On occasion, the ready-to-wear collections take on the mammoth task of deconstructing conventional ideas of dress, toying with ideas of gender fluidity, intellectuality in fashion, and excesses in glamour.
While dealing with a variety of collections that do not betray his meticulous hand in fashion, Alessandro and his team’s take on these dichotomies trickle down even to the most ensuing evergreen classics, or what Gucci prefers to call, the Beloved collection of bags based on theHouse’s archive-inspired narrative.Since his first season, Michele had a difficult legacy to live up to. The Italian brand has one of the greatest leather goods histories of any fashion house.
To some degree, while other fashion houses have distinguishing silhouettes that travel across ready-to-wear collections, Gucci has iconic bags that live and have lived in our minds for decades. Gucci, after all, is a house that found its fame as a leather goods maker, expertly targeting wealthy travellers during the dawn of travel’s golden age before its name became synonymous with the words “luxury” in contemporary fashion.
So the question remains, how has Michele lived up to that legacy?
Photography Ching, Green plastic soldiers
Styling Tok Wei Lun
By introducing the Gucci Beloved lines — a centre-fixture of its seasonal offerings that would repeatedly introduce new takes to its abundance of iconic bags — the creative director achieved a revived vision of Gucci’s signature leather goods. Without doubting the efficacy of this new strategy, this signature would begin to appear in all ready-to-wear shows, advertising campaigns, and celebrity dressings simultaneously.
For the first time since Tom Ford’s era, which others have tried shadowing, the bags offered at Michele’s Gucci have retained the deep and genuine originality of a fashion fantasy the House has always been known for. Culled from pop culture, grown up with, mythologised, and endlessly meditated upon by critics, the Gucci bags that have very much become a part of luxury fashion’s iconography has now been set on a different path from before, and are undoubtedly refreshing to witness.
Crucial to this process were the cultural relevancy of the chosen bags for the Beloved lines and how it translates to today’s audience. For instance, within the Love Parade collection, the Gucci Beloved lines for the first half of 2022 included the Dionysus bag, Horsebit 1955, Jackie 1961, Bamboo 1947, Diana, and the Marmont. Timelessness was an abiding theme throughout these lines offered under the Beloved banner.
That might sound obvious, but it engineers a series of bags that will sustain itself throughout collections and seasons within Gucci without the need to impose trends that might make it more desirable. Its history would serve as the backdrop for these lines, which once lived in their prime as an ‘It’ bag — a hall of fame so to speak. Introducing these cultural connections to contemporary Gucci forges a connection between the past, the present, and the future.
Another aspect of the unified and democratic viewpoint was ensuring men would appeal to the same offerings in these Beloved lines. For instance, when the Jackie was popularised by Tom Ford in the 1990s with its rectangular clasp, it was never known — at least by popular culture — to be a men’s bag. It was attributed as a shoulder bag with its shorter straps and slimmer silhouettes despite the largely unknown possibility of purchasing an extendable shoulder strap.
It was not until the Gucci Fall/Winter ’20 collection that the Jackie in larger sizes (fitted with an extendable strap) convinced men that these offerings were not just for women.
Top that up with Harry Styles carrying a majority of the lines in the collection, and the idea of genderless bags has been finally cemented.“The idea behind Gucci Beloved Lines begins with a favourite accessory of the wardrobe that is a constant source of admiration for its owner,” as explained in its press release.
“It is the bag that came on a first date with someone who became a life partner. Or another worn to an important interview. One carried to the party of the year. Gucci Beloved pieces are also the centrepieces of your every day – companions that pull you together, elevate a look, make your style yours.”
Indeed, the Gucci Beloved Line is a mix of magnetic characters from the past that above all, carries a very human approach. Michele’s assertive way in commanding fashion as we have never seen before —to make sense of the past as it becomes the future, and to do it in a way no one has tried before.
At the heart of it, all was the desire to put the sense of real narratives back into the brand, and the Gucci Beloved Line best carries that notion forward.
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