“We should not start over in the same way, breathless. It’s been too difficult. I want to start over with a breath of fresh air, with oxygen,” says Gucci’s Alessandro Michele.
Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, this much is clear: the fashion industry will forever be transformed by this global crisis. If our business is ever to feel normal again, it will be a new normal, with once grand department stores now shuttered or shrunken, and many designers and brands sadly gone for good. And the fashion show system? As glorious as individual shows can be, as a whole they’re unsustainable—excessive in terms of cost, time, and waste.
Over the last two weeks, designers, business leaders, and fashion’s governing bodies have begun setting out proposals for change. This Memorial Day weekend—precisely a year after hisat Rome’s Musei Capitolini, the acme of “the old way of doing things”—Gucci’s Alessandro Michele took to his Instagram account to tease some of the shifts he’s been considering.
At least some of the uncertainty about the future stems from the fact that Gucci is just one brand in a globe-spanning ecosystem. Michele urged an “open dialogue” with other houses and fashion’s governing bodies. “Rewiring” the system, to borrow the language of one of the industry proposals that emerged earlier this month, will require coordination on a massive scale, both externally and internally.
The unspoken message of all this may be that fashion shows are not the be all and end all of consumer engagement that their massive expense would seem to suggest they are. That said, Michele is committed to them. “I’m passionate about fashion shows, but maybe we can be open to seeing them in a different way. This is a suggestion we’re receiving from our current experience,” he added, nodding at the journalists on the virtual call. The dialogue will continue.
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