Discover GUCCI Fall Winter 2022.23 Exquisite campaign, that celebrates cinema and especially American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. In charge of photography were Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, with creative direction from Alessandro Michele, and art direction by Christopher Simmonds. Beauty is work of hair stylist Paul Hanlon, and makeup artist Thomas De Kluyver. Among the stars of the campaign are David Ge, Jean Meyer, Luke Clod, and Tengde Wang. The campaign reimagines scenes from Kubrick’s films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Eyes Wide Shut, and The Shining.
As an act of love, I decided to reinhabit Kubrick’s films, pushing to the core this incendiary approach. I took the liberty of disassembling, blending, grafting and reassembling them. Sticking to my creative praxis, I seized those movies, resemanticizing them, populating them with my clothes. Trying to create short circuits where the adidas gown, that had already lost its status of sportswear to become a Victorian costume, appears as a new character in the script of Barry Lyndon. The dress designed by Laura Whitcomb, wearing which Madonna grabbed the New York spotlight in the nineties, fits in the gothic scenes of The Shining. The mysterious darkness of the enigmatic ritual of Eyes Wide Shut embraces a venus in fur, embellished with sensual bourgeois pearls. And more, the 90s shoes with a fetish flavour explode through the frames of A Clockwork Orange. Finally, the dreamiest evening dress dangled in soft tulle ruches bursts into the aseptic and dystopian space of the Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This situationist game mixes historical plans, references, experiences. The past explodes into the present. Everything can become anything, or something else. As in that famous scene of Kubrick’s masterpiece, where the bone turns into a spaceship. As in life.
With “Exquisite” I carry on my attempt to mingle high and low, this time coherently and synergistically with the grammar of the great director. In the selected sequences it feels like Nietzsche, Kant and Freud speak casually to the people in the street. The biggest questions about the meaning of life become pop images. Complex transfigurations in terms of significance, get immediate accesses in terms of experience. Everything comes to be iconic, symbolically sophisticated, though able to reflect on a culture that we can definitely identify as pop. I chose Kubrick also for this, after all. What he created is part of our collective imagination. Since he was a diviner of vision, his works are as recognizable as the Sistine Chapel, the Virgin of the Rocks or The Simpsons. Manipulating his images, inside a brand new semantic framework, is like hacking La Gioconda. Plus the inspiration and the empathy only possible through the fictional cinematographic machine. – Alessandro Michele
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and all related characters and elements © & ™ Turner Entertainment Co. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, BARRY LYNDON, EYES WIDE SHUT, THE SHINING and all related characters and elements © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (s22)
Replicas of the original costume designs curated by Milena Canonero and Charlotte Walter.
