Macaulay Culkin and Jared Leto gave strong runway swagger as they hit the streets of Hollywood Boulevard in LA on Wednesday for the Gucci Love Parade show.
Leto, dressed in white lace-front trousers and an oversized tweed blazer, and Culkin, looking effortlessly cool in a Hawaiian shirt, baggy slacks and clogs, were joined on the runway by a whole host of stars, among them actor Jeremy Pope, musician Steve Lacy, Anne Boleyn star Jodie Turner-Smith, St Vincent, writer and filmmaker Miranda July and singer Phoebe Bridgers.
It was a fittingly star-studded line up for a show devised as a love letter to the effervescing “dream factory” that is Hollywood, and the front row was similarly celeb-filled. Serena Williams, Miley Cyrus, Salma Hayek and Gwyneth Paltrow took their pavement seats, with the latter wearing an updated version of the Tom Ford-designed red velvet Gucci tux she sported back in 1996.
Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele, whose mother had worked in her youth as an assistant in a film production company, had taken inspiration from the stories he’d been told about Hollywood as a child. “There was the alabaster paleness of Marilyn Monroe…There were the black satin gloves of Rita Hayworth and Veronica Lake’s velvet hair, as well as the bewitching allure of Rock Hudson and Kim Novak’s dizzying transformative power. Everything felt like a fairy tale,” he said in the show notes, explaining how at the time they “lived in a squat in the outskirts of Rome” and the stories of Hollywood were his “bright shiny star,” his escape.
And certainly the clothes themselves were full of magic and escapism, with pink satin men’s jumpsuits, ostrich feather coats and floor-skimming feather boa-trimmed gold and baby pink sequin floor-length gowns offering ready-made red carpet frivolity. Elsewhere cowboy hats worn with oversized three-piece suiting and piping-trimmed tracksuits had an all-American feel.
Gucci has pivoted to a seasonless model, and therefore crop tops and thigh-skimming hems sat alongside heavy tweed coats and velvet suiting in a 70s-inflected collection that combined OTT Hollywood glamour with Californian ease.
“Los Angeles shines in its own magic,” said Michele, “which is timeless; it’s a place that brushes the divinities, becoming a mythology of the possible.”
