The decision was revealed in a series of excerpts from Alessandro Michele’s lockdown dairies this weekend.
Just a week after a group of designers came together to propose several changes to the traditional fashion week schedule, Alessandro Michele has announced that Gucci is pulling out of the calendar altogether and that it will go seasonless moving forward.
Michele published excerpts from his personal isolation journals from over the past few months on Gucci’s Instagram over the weekend, revealing his decision. “I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call. We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story. Irregular, joyful and absolutely free chapters, which will be written blending rules and genres, feeding on new spaces, linguistic codes and communication platforms.” He added, “I would like to leave behind the paraphernalia of leitmotifs that colonized our prior world: cruise, pre-fall, spring-summer, fall-winter. I think these are stale and underfed words. Labels of an impersonal discourse that lost its meaning. Containers that progressively detached themselves from the life that generated them, losing touch with reality.”
Michele also reflected on humanity’s (and fashion’s) relationship with the world in the notes, writing, “Our reckless actions have burned the house we live in. We conceived of ourselves as separated from nature, we felt cunning and almighty. We usurped nature, we dominated and wounded it. We incited Prometheus, and buried Pan. So much haughtiness made us lose our sisterhood with the butterflies, the flowers, the trees and the roots. So much outrageous greed made us lose the harmony and the care, the connection and the belonging. We ravaged the sanctity of life, neglectful of our being as a species. at the end of the day, we were out of breath.”
He also hinted at an overhaul of the brand’s sustainability practices which are expected to be announced officially by the brand today. All of these decisions, he wrote, are aimed at “building a new creative universe.” He finished the note by reiterating his passion for the industry, writing, “Now that we are still apart, my love for fashion burns. Our species, after all, is like that: we love like crazy in the throes of what is missing.”
The announcement follows similar proclamations by the likes of Saint Laurent – who has dropped out of Paris Fashion Week to show on its own schedule moving forward – and the news that both London and Milan Fashion Week will go digital this year.