Following the digital installment of the Paris Couture Week, it was the turn of biggest Italian fashion houses including Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo and Dsquared2 to roll out their new collections next season’s collections via immersive video content. The four-day digital fashion showcase was slated to see both mens and pre-womenswear collection in digital presentations and livestreams.

One of the major fashion houses charged with closing the big digital event is Gucci, whose creative director Alessandro Michele has recently announced that the label will no longer be subject to the traditional fashion week calendar and will release collections at their own pace. Officially bidding farewell to the era of seasonal fashion, the label has unveiled its Cruise 2021 range appropriately titled ‘Epilogue’ in a 12-hour live streaming including an exclusive 20-minute choreographed feature. The livestream is now available to watch on Gucci.com, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo and the Gucci app, furthering creative director Alessandro Michele’s decision to forgo the traditional fashion schedule and instead adopt “a new cadence”, as revealed in a series of posts from the beginning of May.

“As for me, it represents the possibility to accomplish my questioning about the world of fashion, through a path that is like a fairy tale in three parts,” the house’s creative director Alessandro Michele shared in a press release. He sees this show as an opportunity to investigate our past and present while opening up to a better future as we try to imagine what tomorrow is going to look like. “It was necessary for me to go down that road brimful of love. It was a road that, while I walked, deposited new questions and stirred things up, producing new intuitions. In this sense, the epilogue that I deliver to you today really feels like an overture.”

It all started back in February when Michele wanted to celebrate the magical ritual of the fashion show: “a sacred and unrepeatable liturgy through which creative thinking goes public and offers itself to the interpretation of a community of emancipated spectators.” In wanting to reveal what lies behind this cultural tradition in the world of fashion, he posed the questions that are only becoming the more important today: What is the impact of unveiling what builds illusion? What happens to a ritual as it is profaned? How do we reconfigure wonder, epiphany and suggestion? What happens to the creative product when it escapes predetermination? What happens to fashion, and its seductive ability, when the true goes back to being just a moment of the false? 

The campaign shoot and livestream content are being captured at Palazzo Sacchetti In Rome; more campaign imagery will be shot at another location, Campo Boario. The collection itself is an eclectic mix of patterns, logos and vibrant colors ranging from bright reds and greens to pastel pinks. with an abundance of accessories including chain belts, headscarves and feather boas. The spectacle comes to a head in the epilogue that seals the closure of a trilogy of love: “The clothes will be worn by those who created them. The designers with whom, every day, I share the daze of creation, will become the performers of a new story. They will seize the poetry they contributed to mould. They will stage what we passionately imagined.”

The thought of Epilogue came to the house’s creative director under the coronavirus lockdown, where he discussed sustainability pithing the house and his decision to build a new path in personal diaries. “The start of this quest unfolded in February,” as per the collection’s press notes. “On that occasion, I wanted to celebrate the magical ritual of the fashion show: a sacred and unrepeatable liturgy through which creative thinking goes public and offers itself to the interpretation of a community of emancipated spectators. I wanted to unveil what lies behind the curtains of this ritual.”

To further the experience, Michele has also curated a playlist featuring a selection of tracks as an audio representation of the Gucci Cruise 2021. Check out the collection’s key looks in the gallery below: