GUCCI X BALENCIAGA WAS A “HACK”
DENIZ AKKAYA
Last week, the fashion world was buzzing about the rumor that the Gucci show, titled Aria, would be a collaboration between Gucci and Balenciaga.
Gucci’s new “ARIA” collection was revealed yesterday via a fashion film. The moment marks the first collection presented during the house’s centennial anniversary. It also confirmed that the rumors of a collab between Gucci and Balenciaga were true — kind of.
Gucci’s long history can’t be contained within a single inaugural act. As any other existence, its destiny is marked by a long series of “endless births” (M. Zambrano) and constant regenerations. In this persistent movement, life challenges the mystery of death. In this hunger for birth, we have learnt how to dwell the time. Celebrating this birthday means to pay homage to the mother’s womb then, but also to the becoming other.
In this sense, Gucci becomes a hacking lab, made of incursions and metamorphoses. An alchemical factory of contaminations where everything connects to anything. A place where thefts and explosive reactions happen: a permanent generator of sparkles and unpredictable desires.
It was not a collaboration. Instead, the house said it was a product of creative director Alessandro Michele’s “hack lab”, a theoretical place Michele has dipped his toes in before, where he pulls together wild references from different places and times and puts them together into contemporary cultural statements.
At the show’s close, the symbolism and the symbiosis couldn’t have been clearer. Models in co-branded Gucci and Balenciaga threads began to float and rise to a new heaven as the electropop soundtrack blasted the words “what the future holds” from Vitalic feat. David Shaw and The Beat’s ‘Waiting For The Stars’.
