We’re seeing stars

One never forgets their first encounter with cinema, of a big world beyond yours on a big screen. For Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, growing up as a child living on the outskirts of Rome, his mother’s subversive tales of stars and Hollywood behind the scenes, through the eyes of a film assistant, enabled him his escape — to dream. This is why he shut down Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles for his second collection in the centenary year of the House, Gucci Love Parade.

True Hollywood legends like Macaulay Culkin in a Hawaiian shirt print, Jodie Turner-Smith peacocking in a lush feather coat, Jared Leto looking like the bespectacled executive with the double-breasted suit about to make your dreams come true walked the runway, along with Phoebe Bridgers, looking like a fancy concierge who’s seen one too many things. In an ode to the classic Westerns, indigenous model and land protector Quannah Chasinghorse appears in a cascading lace gown befitting the hero of the story.

The cowboy hat is styled with athleisure and aerobics-style spandex and boxy ‘80s-style suits in Gucci logomania and soft retro tones, calling to mind both today’s starlet and the retro pin-up stars of generations past — those who are chasing their dreams, those who “made it” and those who remain in love with it all after all these years. Silver screen stars, prom queens like Carrie and Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra are reincarnated in nymph-like gowns and ball skirt dresses.

Michele says in his show notes: “Here actors and actresses are acknowledged as heroes of the myth: hybrid creatures with the power to hold divine transcendence and mortal existence at the same time, both imaginary and the real. They are the idols of a new contemporary cosmogony.”

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In the Philippines, Gucci is in Greenbelt 4, Ayala Center, Makati and Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Ortigas, exclusively distributed by Store Specialists, Inc.