From a desire to place once more the actual material process of dressmaking at the heart of fashion discourse, that the new Gucci Fall 2019 ad campaign was born, under the direction of Alessandro Michele. In it, fashion in its ready-to-wear version once more makes the headlines, becomes the protagonist, as might have happened thirty years ago, when sensational headlines on covers were devoted to a must-have hemline, a seasonal colour, a fabric.

The fabula of fashion begins at the drawing table, then moves to the workshops, during fittings, trials and fault finding. It is a tale of manual and material skills, the result of a specific know-how that today we tend to discount, to take for granted. The tale of fashion and tales about fashion are the stuff of legend, that comes to life with the advent of prêt-à-porter and its heyday, those iconic images that span four decades: the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, and become contemporary in the lexicon of the Creative Director of the House of the Double G.

Alessandro Michele’s creative and intellectual path shines through in Glen Luchford’s shots for the Gucci Fall 2019 ad campaign. In this case, it is a past that is sufficiently recent and iconic that it brings back never-forgotten memories, but at the same time sufficiently remote, to younger onlookers, to appear mythical and surprising.

The narration is there, and it is obvious, but it is entirely bound up with the process of making and promoting clothes as articles of clothing: in the workshop, during the design and creation phase, on the runway, through the specialist press. A tale of objects, not characters, with wordings intentionally old-world, because the clothes’ true tale will be told by their wearers. Through a dynamic visual narrative, it is suggested that the product must take centre stage.

The clothes take on the role of absolute protagonists and tell their own story, and for this reason are deserving also of the title and the cover. In other words, it is an evolution from the immaterial to the material, without forfeiting Gucci’s referential metalanguage which in this campaign turns the sublime memories of the savoir-faire into memorabilia.