Gucci's first DIY campaign

The Ritual is the name chosen by Gucci for its new FW20-21 campaign and made entirely of selfies made by the same models. All the images were made without the normal support that can be found on a photo set as stylist and hair & make-up artist. The result was interesting on the level of used mediums, which went from the traditional camera to the iPhone to the Polaroid, and it also can be said that the campaign managed to nail that bohemian and somewhat shabby chic style that distinguishes the Gucci by Alessandro Michele who, in an interview with Another Magazine, emphasized the link between this campaign and his latest show inspired by the concept of meta-fashion :

«I started the campaign during that work in Milan, on the show. Because I was thinking in the same way, working from another perspective to reveal the hidden part of the work. I was thinking what would happen if we change the perspective in the campaign […]. I wanted to stop being the obsessive director of the image. [...] I was thinking, ‘what happens if I do what Andy Warhol did?’ […] I tried to change the point of view, and so I tried to get inside the lives of my guys. I didn’t use them as just models, but I used them as characters».

The mention to Warhol as a director is particularly interesting. One of Michele's main cinematic inspirations until now, in fact, has been that of Fellini – author whose memorialistic and surreal style matches well with the aesthetic developed by Michele for Gucci. Fellini represents an ideal opposite of Andy Warhol as a director: the former carefully controlled every movement of his actors and every detail of the images, the second shot them in real time and without any kind of direction so as not to alter the realism of his characters. The Ritual would therefore represent an experiment, the transition from a ubiquitous authorship to an absent one, from an extreme of artificiality to one of spontaneity.

Michele's aesthetic, after so many carefully constructed professional shoots, finds mordant when decontextualized in the everyday life and recalls the FW18 campaign of the brand set in a fish & chips store starring Harry Styles – one of the first to see the singer collaborate with Gucci and also one of the most viral and incisive. Gucci remains one of the most original and creative brands in the industry and it is always interesting to know what will be the next direction that will take the aesthetic language of its director Alessandro Michele.