Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele has announced that the brand is permanently leaving behind the traditional fashion calendar as the fashion industry rethinks how it operates in the light of COVID-19. The decision to cut the number of fashion shows that Gucci holds every year is also taken in an effort to reduce waste.
According to BBC, the company says the concept of seasonal clothes has become obsolete. The Italian luxury label has decided to desegregate menswear and womenswear, cancel mid-season collections and reduce the number of their annual showcases from five to two “seasonless” catwalk shows.
Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele
The label said the traditional rota of spring/summer, autumn/winter, cruise and pre-fall shows was “stale”. The label has no plans for a show in September, the time when it would traditionally show a new collection at the Milan fashion week.
“Clothes should have a longer life than that which these words attribute to them,” Michele said.
Michele posted a series of diary entries titled “Notes from the Silence,” on his Instagram account on Sunday, the designer said he intended to “abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows” in order to “regain a new cadence.”
Gucci is the first major label to announce this move to a leaner and less wasteful fashion system. The decision is a game-changer, one that was long due and needed, especially after the current circumstance. However, the bigger question now is will other major brands follow?
Yves Saint Laurent, also owned by Kering, the Gucci parent company, has previously suggested it was considering leaving the fashion calendar behind too.
In a statement last month, YSL designer Anthony Vaccarello said the brand would “take control” of the fashion schedule “conscious of the current circumstances and its waves of radical change”.
The coronavirus pandemic has hit the fashion industry hard on a global scale. But this unfortunate shutdown has also given an opportunity to those in powerful positions to reflect on all that is wrong with fast fashion and how endless trends and styles are motivating wrong values of consumption.
