The South Bank is set for a serious glow-up this evening as the fashion world descends on SE1 for Gucci’s latest show at Tate Modern. Fashion editors are used to being whisked off to glamorous, far-flung locations for May’s round of cruise shows. These have become a spin-off marketing industry as luxury players vie for the biggest spending EIP clients (extremely important, not just very) and the attention of social media users. Do pluck your tiny violin for the poor London-based souls who were hoping for an injection of Avios points: previous shows have seen them jet off to Seoul and southern Italy. This season, Southwark will have to do.
The luxury world has a bit of a Cool Britannia crush right now. Gucci is following Chanel, which showed in Manchester’s Northern Quarter in December; in June, Dior is taking over Perthshire for its Drummond Castle show, hosting guests at Gleneagles Hotel. The Italian giant — now led by Sabato De Sarno, marking his first year as creative director at the house — has form in the capital. The legend goes that founder Guccio Gucci worked as a porter at The Savoy and it was heaving the guests’ luggage around that gave him the idea to create his own leather house. Fittingly, Gucci will host a pre-show cocktail party at the hotel tonight.
In 2016, De Sarno’s decadent predecessor Alessandro Michele (a committed Anglophile, with an admirable affection for Charleston and Chatsworth) raised eyebrows with his grand show in Westminster Abbey’s cloisters. “Selling our soul for a pair of trousers,” quipped the Reverend Peter Owen Jones at the time. Tate Modern is admittedly a less opulent location — and there has been some eye-rolling. Philip Green’s Topshop used to show there, as have Harris Reed and Christopher Kane. But event producers understand that finding a suitable venue in the capital to fit the 600 guests Gucci has invited — including locals Kate Moss and Little Simz — is no mean feat. That’s why Burberry erects a giant tent each season.
The show also serves as the opening to a cultural partnership between Gucci and the Tate. The luxury brand is sponsoring autumn’s Electric Dreams exhibition and has committed to a three-year partnership supporting Tate’s work with young creatives. It fits with fashion’s current lean into an egalitarian, modernist mood — despite its ever-rising pricing and courting of the 0.001 per cent. Both Roksanda and Bottega Veneta took inspiration from Le Corbusier’s Cabanon retreat.
At the beginning of May, Chanel showed its latest cruise collection in Marseille on the rooftop of Le Corbusier’s post-war social housing project Unité d’Habitation — the Riviera’s answer to the Barbican, if you will. It’s the global downturn represented in venue if not perhaps in spirit — call it poverty porn or “derelicte” — as luxury fashion still keeps flogging £5,000 handbags to those uppermost in the echelons of high net worth.
Gucci showing here is all good and glossy PR for this city, but it does highlight something rather awkward for our homegrown style stars. Aside from Burberry, none of our other major British brands show in London any more. For its 40th anniversary London Fashion Week didn’t have Vivienne Westwood (now helmed by the late designer’s husband Andreas Kronthaler), Paul Smith, Alexander McQueen, Victoria Beckham or Stella McCartney, who have all decamped to Paris for its haute glitz and high-fashion positioning. Gucci has come here for cultural grit and cool; all our lot want is European polish (and customers).
It has ever been thus — our fashion industry is so beleaguered and overlooked that the Government still won’t ditch the VAT tourist tax. That was cited last week as the reason for redundancies at Selfridges and a new report from Global Blue shows that tourists have switched their spending to Paris and Milan. But given the lack of support and investment in the fashion industry — instead of investing in local manufacturing and skill, Britain is chasing Shein’s foreign fast fashion IPO — it’s no wonder our top talent has exported itself. Viva Gucci.
