To Hell with Minimalism!

Although there are lone wolfs (or is it heavy hitters?) that preview their resort collections months early, the thick of the season has been set in motion this week and will continue through the greater half of next.

Some of the topical conversations that have erupted in the past couple of seasons include how “resort is becoming the third fashion week,” whether it is appropriate that more designers are favoring shows (located in faraway destinations, no less) in place of presentations and frankly, how un-resort resort has become.

But yesterday in Chelsea, across 22nd street by the highway, Gucci added a new point to the roster of talking ticks with its decidedly maximalist approach to a collection that has no place priming on a beach.

New creative director Alessandro Michele in fact seems to be turning on its head the relatively recent adoration fashion has shown for both minimalism and irony, pointing his nose up at clean lines for the sake of fur trim! And metallic brocade! Moving parts like a pair of glasses, floral wreaths and hair pins or a beret, shiny shoes and lurex socks — prints! Loud colors! Lace up shoes and fur pom poms.

The kind of clothes that make you wonder how so many different points can possibly be conveyed and furthermore successfully (aspirationally) executed on just the single canvas of one human body. The show was thrilling. It was a roller coaster of stimulation oscillating between a jovial take on menswear dressing married to hyper-literalized scenarios that took clichés, crystallized them and seemingly made living up to their corny ambitions feel, in a word, satisfying.

If you’re confused about what I mean, consider the girl in the beret.

She closed the show in her pleated lamé maxi skirt and pink x-mules. She was wearing little earrings and a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses that made her look, ay first glance, like a librarian with an interest in fashion or at least eclecticism. But she also conveyed an unvarnished and charmingly stereotypical take on the French intellectual who spends most of her day sitting beside a notebook at an outdoor cafe in Paris. Mais oui! And why not? There is no doubt that an element of thrill and escapism — a motif we started to see being sprinkled back into high fashion in Paris last February — is inferred here. More and more, I’m believing that we need it. I think it took getting caught in the yawns of normcore to realize it. Because here we spend the whole of our realities firmly planted in, you know, reality, so why can’t — why shouldn’t — our clothes foretell our dreams?

All in favor of decadent and fancy, urgent and necessary futility, say pearl buttons sewn into suede bows that lace up my calves!

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Images via Style.com