So Deer To Me – Gucci Pre-Fall 2020
Gucci releases their new collection for this winter
As hard as it is to look too far ahead into the future at the moment, believe it or not winter is coming and the world does keep on turning. The pre-fall fashion campaigns are no exception. Gucci’s latest offering for pre-fall 2020 underwrites the major steps the company has been taking in recent years to respond to the global climate crisis. For instance, the Italian fashion house has been carbon neutral across its whole supply chain since 2018, a goal Burberry has said they will hope to achieve by 2022. So the new campaign shot by Alisdair McLellan leans heavily into that philosophy and not only takes everything back to nature but also infuses it with a childlike and playful innocence from when the world was ‘safe’ (and perhaps will be again).
The Gucci pre-fall 2020 collection itself invokes invokes tales of the Swinging Sixties, with corduroy suits, mini-dresses, flared jeans and flower power prints all in bright and bold colours. It’s a campaign that feeds into the aura of childhood innocence and discovery. The creative and art direction, by Alessandro Michele and Christopher Simmonds respectively, revolves around a natural rather than an unattainable, glamorous looking cast of models that brings the whole aesthetic closer to the eye-lines of their consumers. That’s not to say the whole thing is any less creative or artistic than others in the same realm. In fact, there’s an almost surrealistic dream quality to the art – with lush green grass, rolling hills, babbling brooks and children’s playground equipment providing the seemingly incongruous backdrop to Gucci’s sharp-edged fashion. Yet, this is why artists at the top of their game get paid the big bucks. In their mind’s eye they are able to see the things that we don’t. So the addition of woodland animals like deer, rabbits, owls, hedgehogs and skunks (yes, skunks) might seem like a bizarre thought to others in the abstract, but to real artists they’re just more colours on the palette with which to paint the picture.
The underlying message of the campaign is clear by the images alone. But even beyond that there’s more story to be told. Gucci is also a participant in the Lion’s Share Fund, an initiative set up to raise funding for natural habitats and endangered species. It’s a surprising and little known statistic that animals appear in roughly 20% of all advertising campaigns globally each each year, without receiving the commensurate financial support in return. So all signatories to the Lion’s Share Fund donates 0.5% of their total annual media spends to the charity to provide real, tangible support on the ground in addition to the efforts with the manufacturing and supply chain on the other end. So whether it’s animal conservation, environmental conservation, art, pin-sharp fashion or you’re just curious to see what luxury fashion really looks like in the world of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels, Gucci has you covered.
Additional image credits: Hair, Paul Hanlon MUA, Thomas De Kluyver.
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