Creative Director Alessandro Michele chose the Alchemists’s Garden: An Anti-Modern Laboratory as the theme for Gucci’s first unified Men’s & Women’s Fall-Winter 2017 Fashion Show that took place in Milan.
The Alchemists Garden is a garden of plants and animals. A garden inhabited by signs, symbols and archetypes invoking and recalling remote worlds. In this magic place, curious hands play with the matter, blending it with the unconscious. As in an alchemic laboratory, the substances are selected, analysed, decomposed and treated. It’s a creative process with the beat of slow incubation and sudden epiphanies. A process in which the power of imagination forces the inertia of reality.
As alchemy tried to transform base materials into gold, what emerges here is a precious distillate, resulting from a dreamy process of transmutation of the matter.
A transformative whirl that reassembles fragments, codes and stories projected on a fresh horizon of sense. A change of status where echoes and survivals, “repressions and returns of the repressed, repetitions and revisions, traditions and missing links, tectonic movements and superficial earthquakes” (G. Didi-Huberman) create the plot of a new tale.
