5 things to know about the Gucci show in Los Angeles Alessandro Michele's love letter to the City of Angels
«[Los Angeles] is where I met the most peculiar people, out of time, refractory to any idea of order. […] A parade of enchanted and deeply free beings that go across a land where neither past nor future reside», these are perhaps the most important words of the show notes signed by Alessandro Michele for Gucci's Love Parade show, held tonight on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. The show was a love letter to Hollywood but, rather than explicitly celebrating the myth of the great stars of the Golden Age as many had predicted, Michele's collection focused on mythologizing the human fauna of the city: starlets and beauty queens, aspiring celebrities, movie stars. A clue to his inspiration were the cowboy hats, the activewear details worn together with the elegant dresses, the sparkling evening skirts, the Hawaiian shirts in full Hunter S. Thompson style – all stylistic features of everyday Hollywood, the one you meet at the Chateau Marmont, in the producers' pools in Beverly Hills, at the bus stops where young actors with big hopes arrive. «My Hollywood is in the streets», explained Michele after the show.
1. Hollywood Sadcore
Thompson is not only the writer who invented the concept of gonzo journalism but also one of the most important and neglected style icons of the 70s. Mixing vintage and sportswear pieces, using huge orange aviator glasses, the calculated neglect used in combining trousers with pins with Hawaiian shirts and cowboy hats – all stylistic features that are part of Thompson's eccentric legacy. A writer who, moreover, invented his own unique way of mixing literary genres, becoming a rebel and an iconoclast, but also challenging the idea of what an intellectual could be and above all how an intellectual had to dress.
5. Alessandro Michele and autobiographism in fashion
In his show notes, Alessandro Michele talked about how the origin of his love of cinema was the work of his mother, who worked at Cinecittà in Rome and who told him as a young man about the great myths of Hollywood – making the designer develop a passion for the world of films that led him at a certain point even to think about becoming a costume designer. Things turned out differently. At the same time, the fact that the show notes begin as an autobiographical story points out how, more and more in the latest collections, designers have talked about very personal topics: from Virgil Abloh's sneakers that evoke his passion for Michael Jordan's merch as a young man to Demna who talks about how his love for The Simpsons was born in his childhood, Oliver Rousteing who, on the Balmain catwalk, wears the bandages with which he lived for months after a serious burn, in recent months designers have rediscovered the autobiographical dimension of fashion stortytelling.
