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The coronavirus pandemic that has been plaguing the world for the past months has had a major impact on the fashion industry in significant ways. The concept of fast fashion has been developing over the past few years and high fashion designers are even attempting to make their “haute couture” more sustainable. Gucci has announced that from now on, the brand will be seasonless. Alessandro Michele, creative director at the Italian based fashion house, made this announcement on May 23, 2020. The brand turned to Instagram to announce this, posting 6 of Michele’s diary entries entitled “Notes from Silence”. The fifth installment demonstrated Michele’s new plan for Gucci and their collections – posted in both Italian and English I have linked it below.
So what does this mean going forward for Gucci and the fashion industry?
Well, there is no doubt that this is due to the cancellation of many fashion shows and creating a virtually obsolete fashion calendar during this pandemic. But designers have used this to look at how the calendar and expectations for collections are set up, and how they can improve the fashion industry and turn towards a less wasteful but more meaningful industry as a whole. Gucci, being the most recent to announce something like this may ignite a larger domino effect throughout the entirety of the fashion industry. They plan to switch from five fashion shows/collections a year to two. The details of this plan have not been announced, but this is most definitely going to have an immense impact throughout the fashion world. Michele said, “clothes should have a longer lifeline than that which these words attribute to them…” about the spring/summer, autumn/winter, cruise and pre-fall collections that are made each year.
This will entail that clothes will no longer go out of style or not be last season so quickly, something that I know springs upon me without warning. This will most likely also allow for Michele/Gucci to put out more meaningful and interesting designs and collections that provide a longer-lasting impact within the world of fashion. In his diary entries, Michele discussed that Gucci (and the entirety of the fashion industry) went too far and surpassed what fashion and design should be about, and this was becoming increasingly difficult and exhausting for the designers. Michele wrote “The change I imagine involves the capacity to reconnect with the deepest reasons that inspired my entry into the fashion realm” in his third diary entry. He also discusses the need to get rid of the unnecessary. The changes he and the Gucci name are bringing upon the world will return fashion to its true form and bring it back to the art that high fashion is meant to be.
This will hopefully inspire other designers and brands to follow as well and create a more sustainable and overall more meaningful and impactful fashion world – one that inspires, provokes and changes.
