Deterritorialized Cosmogonies

 

At the Gucci event/fashion-show held last May each of the 350 trend-setting guests was offered a tangible piece of the “unsustainable excellence of luxury”: a star or - to be precise - the name of that star on an official paper. It rings to my mind the “vital materialism” defined by Jane Bennett, or in the concept of assemblage made known to a wider audience by Deleuze and Guattari, there can be “Cosmogonie”,

 

Three were the stars of “Cosmogonie.” First the location: Castel del Monte, a massive, almost impenetrable Swabian castle in the Andria area of Puglia. A symbolic throne for the Florentine host Gucci, a company selling ‘dreams that money can buy’ with sales greater than the GDP of dozens of sovereign states.

 

The second star was the captain of the ship: Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri. Massive build, crain rasée, he's the man behind the three-digit growth in profits of the French mother company, and Gucci's successful viral marketing campaigns.

 

Last, but not least, here comes the North Star of the Gucci cosmogony, the creative director that Bizzari in 2015 appointed to his side: Alessandro Michele. Most brilliant designer, Michele is capable of developing a collection in a few days, as well as conceptually defined aesthetic cosmogonies:

 

"Today putting together a collection means telling what your idea of the world is and doing my job means entering a world of multiple references, a gigantic chorus, an immense ocean."

 

For this event the castle looks as immovable as ready to face any wonder. It has become a feminine omphalos, a building dear to numerologists with an illuminated belly erupting 100 different Gucci looks for the 2023 campaign. Inclusive young men and beautiful women…  ephebes and of uncertain gender. And here come - in the busy parterre - athletes, actresses, models, music producers.

 

Our unconscious, in the meantime, is busy with different matters: recodifying the signals that come to us from clothes and accessories. A cornucopia of references that has led Vogue Italia to write about:

“a shock wave with a delightfully decorative character that has made the Florentine brand the epicenter of liberated, libertarian and liberating baroque, the encyclopedic temple of a narrative and maximalist fashion that celebrates diversity by discovering its politics in the party superficiality, that glorifies outcasts, sluts, queers and beautiful freaks through exponential collages steeped in the past.”

 

Alessandro is an experienced traveller of artistic contamination and mash up, and he's as sharp and as straight as one of those high notes in a Miles Davis solo - no blurs. His fashion sends subtle, parallactic messages, under the schrapnel of strong aesthetics, conceived to go “beyond hermeneutics,” sheer joy for the eye.

 

Michele has an almost African freedom in re-matching styles, materials, patterns, details, irreconcilable accessories or colors coming from the last 50 years of fashion. It can be seen at work in certain paradoxical shapes, other almost cartoonish and symbolic, or in the hyper-realistic use of the house’s ethernal Gucci logo (in one case a model had her hair shaved to form many GGs!)

 

Total nude-look and orange glasses as big as headlights; double Gs in relief on a velvet jacket and trousers. And excellent excrescences question the otherwise fluid backdrop of the “Michele cosmogony”: like those fine chains hanging from the ears to the corners of the mouth… to recall the Orient or bits and bridles?

 

And what about the gloves, now totally surgical, without frills but cut on the bias, in latex? And setting a Gucci fashion show called “Cosmogonie” today with Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin as inspirations - isn’t that simply in liminasl space?!

 

After all, Castel del Monte itself is “architecture in balance” between history, numerology (octagonal plan + 8 small octagonal towers, etc.), astronomy (the orientation of the openings, etc.), the occult (from above, what is it?) and proto-brutalism.

 

An essential part of this assemblage is music. Among the guests Lana del Rey and Måneskin, the latter (Gucci's brand ambassadors) dressed in a sort of Michele-boosted revisitation of the Bay City Rollers chequers meshed with urban attires in the guise of Ultravox! Måneskin's single SuperModel (co-produced with Rami Yacoub, Sly, and Max Martin; as Vogue Scandinavia calls it: the “Scandi pop elite”) is hot off the press this week.

 

The quality and quantity of the 20' audio playlist - as drawn from the video - are enigmatically sober: Charms (Abel Korzeniowski), Auras (Furtherset), Akoluthic Phase (Hiro Kone), 3 Minutes Of (Moderat), 2254 (Slikback & Brodinski.) Except Moderat, there are sound tapestries between space ambient, glitch and drum & bass: generally music that slips through the air without striking a blow.

 

Korzeniowski’s melancholic ‘well-tempered raga’ plays the role of Leit-motif opening the fashion show and is proposed again at the closing. Taken from the soundtrack of “W./E.” (a box-office flop directed by Madonna in 2012), it is a 9-note theme with minimal variations and a small symphony orchestra arrangement, pleasant. Dejà heard.