Gucci unspools new collection in online fashion TV series, Ouverture of Something That Never Ended

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Nov 16, 2020

Gucci debuted its path-breaking fashion TV series on Monday evening, featuring its latest collection, an online innovation entitled Ouverture of Something That Never Ended, a meeting of movies and mode jointly directed by the house’s creative director Alessandro Michele and filmmaker Gus Van Sant.

 
Ouverture of Something That Never Ended chronicles the daily life of Italian actress and performance artist Silvia Calderoni as she wanders between her home, a café, theater and vintage shop, in a week-long peregrination through Rome. The series runs from Monday, November 16 to Sunday, 22 Nov.
 
Michele and Van Sant shot for 20 days over the last month in Rome and other parts in Italy with Calderoni, and a gang of the designer’s friends. Everyone wears Gucci.

Episode 1, entitled At Home, opens with Silvia’s roommate in a floral dress; white knee socks; court shoes and a beret, wandering sleepily about her entre-deux-guerres apartment. Bed unmade, Calderoni is seen through a gold-fish tank awakening slowly, before feeding the pets. 

 
Breakfast is taken in racy see-through lace pajamas, before Silvia turns on the TV. It is in Spanish – with a man intensely discussing colonial modernism; being a sexual dissident, and creating an alternative conscience. The actress then goes to the loo, all the better for the audience to admire her micro sequin bra. A rock band - dressed in Gucci tracksuits and rocker blouses - is already playing live in the living room, as she brushes her teeth.
 
The TV commentator, played by Spanish writer Paul B. Preciado, then speaks directly to Silvia, warning that “this revolution will be about love.” Speaking now in French and English. Silvia responds by writing phrases like, Facce di tulipano, popping the notes into the latest Gucci handbag.
 
No sooner had the first episode ended than the Florentine fashion house unveiled GucciFest, a series of fashion films that herald the works of multiple independent designers: Ahluwalia, Shanel Campbell, Cormio, Charles De Vilmorin, JordanLuca, Mowalola, Yueqi Qi, Rave Review, Gui Rosa, Rui, Bianca Saunders, Collina Strada, Boramy Viguier, and Gareth Wrighton.
 
But tonight the focus was on Calderoni. A noted star of indie international theatre, Calderoni is arguably most famous for her techno dance routine in a clip from cult film The Legend of Kaspar Hauser, where a demented cowboy DJ Vincent Gallo yells at her as she careens around a scene shot on a rocky shore. It has garnered some 1.2 million views.

She finishes her opening in this Gucci surrealist series in a sherbet-hued evening dress and matching skullcap, before going to open her mailbox and letting a floral gown slip from her hand from a balcony and fall onto the street below. A cast of hirsute Gucci fans beneath play basketball; though one model appears at her front door – cycling around the apartment on a kid's bike to the the sounds of Mozart’s Requiem Mass.

 
Van Sant’s most famous films are Drugstore Cowboy and his 1991 movie My Own Private Idaho, which Michele told editors in a pre-show interview “was an eye-opener for me, it made me understand who I am in a delicate way.”
 
The designer and director ended up meeting at a Los Angeles gala, and asked mutual friend, photographer Paige Powell, to shoot the behind-the-scenes images. Van Sant called the end result a “cinematic fusing with commerce, where you have something that is going to be sold and you are literally making a film within that world, and this is maybe partly new — something that you’d see at a World’s Fair.” 
 
Also due to make appearances are Italy’s most famous art critic Achille Bonito Oliva; Billie Eilish, who introduced a new song in the debut episode;  fine jewelry designer Darius Khonsary; Chinese singer, actor and Gucci ad star Lu Han; American playwright Jeremy O. Harris; artist Ariana Papademetropoulos; singer Arlo Parks; German choreographer Sasha Waltz, and singer Florence Welch. Though the biggest named in the cast is very much Harry Styles, whose no show in episode 1 ignited a torrent of comments on YouTube: from "We miss you Harry!" to "Dove sta Harry Styles?"
 
Stay tuned.