What was Gucci like in the early 2000s? Portrait of a fashion that is no longer there

For nearly eight years we have filled our eyes and memories with the nostalgic and esoteric aestheticism that Alessandro Michele has devised for Gucci-so much in fact that the memory of what Gucci was in the late 1990s and throughout the first decade of the 2000s is beginning to fade. And now that Sabato De Sarno has begun to reenact and explore the great classics of the brand's history, filtering them through the contemporary and minimalist lens of his artistic vision, it is good to explore the aesthetic evolution of the brand in the years when the absence of developed digital media like ours and social media made it more difficult to follow its every move and collection.

For now, there is no need to tell too much: just look at how the brand's labels have changed. With Tom Ford and Frida Giannini, under whose control Gucci had become synonymous with a jet-set aesthetic, mingling and minimalist, the labels were black and thin, almost invisible; under Alessandro Michele, those same labels have quadrupled in size, the name of Gucci appears large and black, contrasting with the zigzagged and almost opalescent fabric on which it is sewn, surrounded by a severe dark border. The fundamental transition from old to new fashion lies here – enclosed in a label that is the most essential symbol of a shift that, more than concerning designers, concerns the culture that surrounds fashion.

He made a clean slate of everything giannini had already designed, even casting and the assignment of seats in the hall and in a few days he assembled a collection that already possessed, in the back, that eclectic, gender-fluid and vintage-inspired mood that we all know. On January 19, 2015, the audience was stunned: an ephebic, pale model with long ash blonde hair advanced on the catwalk in a wide red shirt, around his neck a knot typical of female blues, the pussy bow. By that time a new era had begun.