Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele has announced that the brand is permanently abandoning the traditional fashion calendar as the industry rethinks how it operates in the light of Covid-19.
By desegregating menswear and womenswear, and shunning mid-season collections, the Italian luxury label will reduce the number of yearly shows it stages from five to two.
In a series of diary entries titled “Notes from the Silence,” posted to Michele’s Instagram account Sunday, the designer said he intended to “abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows” in order to “regain a new cadence.”
“We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story,” he wrote, adding: “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.”
Major brands have conventionally followed a hectic schedule of separate men’s and women’s runway events at Fall-Winter and Spring-Summer fashion weeks in New York, Paris, London and Milan. Many also stage additional one-off “cruise” and pre-fall shows.
But the coronavirus pandemic has intensified existing concerns about the environmental and economic sustainability of the jet-setting schedule — and the cycles of consumption it encourages.
