Gucci Aria opened with a besuited blonde man approaching the doors of what seems like a gritty NYC nightclub with a Savoy Club neon tacked above its door — a contrasting visual from the chic hotel in London. Upon entering, he is then met with a sleek, clinical corridor flooded with flashing lights and cameras, and an upbeat soundtrack of contemporary R&B and rap songs that allude to Gucci in their lyrics. After taking a strut down this runway, the models pause in a dark anteroom, after which, decked in full glamour, they then enter into an imaginary animal-filled forest where they find themselves gifted with the ability to levitate. It then closes with the visuals of a crystallized heart floating.
The storyline created is not only a symbolic portrayal of the duality of the stardom and mysticism that exists within the brand, but also proposes nature and glamour as solutions to the days in an often mundane pandemic driven world where we are confined to the walls of our home. “We find out that the party we deserve doesn’t happen in the lobby of a London hotel of the 20s. It’s rather like a deep and ecstatic dive into everything we yearningly miss today: a feast of air. A jubilee of breath,” he explains.
It doesn’t feel like a proposal for things to return to ‘normal’ per se, but more so a proposition for things to return to ‘natural’ and calls for a celebration for the things that we take for granted, hence the title Gucci Aria, which translates to breath. In corroboration with this theory, in his show notes, Michele quotes Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, whose work covers medieval philosophy and the theory of the image and the nature of living beings. As Coccia states, “It is the first name of being-in-the-world, it is the vibration through which everything opens up to life… inhaling, that is letting the world get inside us, and exhaling, that is projecting ourselves in the world that we are.”