Digital Milan Fashion Week 2021: The Vogue Verdict

At Gucci, which has announced a new season-less approach for the future, Alessandro Michele showcased his cruise collection – re-titled the “Epilogue” – in a 12-hour live stream from its own campaign shoot, which featured staff from his design studio in place of models. At Versace, Donatella Versace also documented her campaign shoot, turning it into a music video with AJ Tracey. The productions were different, and the clothes worlds apart, but reading between the lines of Galliano, Michele and Versace, I saw a similar subliminal point: if there is no runway show to work towards, the creative process becomes the show itself. If the industry that feeds off designers’ collections wants to debate how often those collections are shown, then we at least have to understand the effort that goes into creating and transmitting them.

In Salvatore Ferragamo’s cruise presentation, which outlined the history and ethics of the brand in a film that culminated in moving editorial imagery, I thought that the message was largely the same. While many brands produced films that echoed the campaigns-in-motion clips we normally see on their social media channels, others took advantage of the makeshift film format. Prada handed its men’s and cruise collections to different photographers and asked them to interpret it through their lens. “We are used to doing fashion shows. But the moment you can’t do a physical show, you have to invent another work. It is not what we know,” Miuccia Prada admitted. “So instead, we decided to give five different people, five different chapters, and complete creative freedom. The concept is something I have always believed in: that once I create clothes, they belong to the life of people. They belong to others.”