The luxury-inclined Londoner might find themselves confused should they turn up at 180 The Strand at the moment. Can this really be the foyer of the Savoy? That wood panelling and chequered floor is instantly recognisable, as is the five-star hotel’s famous red lacquer lift.
The Savoy may be above such humdrum matters as a street number, yet anyone who knows their way around a Hanky Panky — the take on a sweet martini that was first conjured up in its American Bar — also knows that the hotel hovers at No 99 on one of the capital’s most famous streets.
What’s going on? Gucci Cosmos, the newly opened British iteration of an exhibition that was first held in Shanghai this year, is offering a pretty convincing recreation of the Savoy lobby just a few doors along from the actual hotel. Guccio Gucci, the man who founded not a mere brand but a lifestyle in 1921, worked as a luggage porter at the Savoy in the 1890s. It was the posh suitcases that he would haul up its stairs and along its corridors that would inform his own offering when he returned to his native Florence.
Then there was the striking colour of that lift, or “ascending room” as it was known at the time, a technical innovation that was truly earth-moving for those brave enough to try it, even though it took seven minutes to go from one floor to the next. In Gucci’s hands it would be reincarnated as the soon-to-be-signature shade now known as Gucci red, a hue that was reimagined only last month by the brand’s new creative director, Sabato De Sarno, as a deep barolo he called “Ancora” (which can be translated variously as “more” or “again”).
Now the Savoy experience has been retooled as an entrance to the new exhibition, which showcases highlights from the brand’s vast archives normally stored in suitable style in a Renaissance palazzo in its home town.
Why does a brand put on a show like this one? Because modern luxury is about new audiences, about experiences, not so much surround-sound as drown-sound. A cerulean room with a mirrored ceiling and walls of toothsome arm candy is certainly the most delectable inundation imaginable.
“Specialità valigeria inglese” reads a Gucci advertisement from 1922 on view in one of the first rooms. Gucci didn’t set out to sell posh luggage generally then, but English posh luggage. Why? Because the “stile inglese” was the most potent aesthetic in the world at the time, informing everything from tailoring to shoes for smart men across Italy and pretty much everywhere else. And because the British, along with those Waspy East Coast Americans who could back then have been confused for the same thing, were its most avid travellers — the original globetrotters.
What brand Gucci offered, almost from the start, was an interface between the best of tradition and the allure of the new. A shiny scarlet soft suitcase from the 1950s looks so contemporary as to fit right in next to the shimmering scarlets that De Sarno displayed in his first catwalk show in Milan last month. A floral case from a decade later is almost as outré as the creations shown nearby by the famously flamboyant Alessandro Michele, who exited the top job last year.
The other bits of the inimitable Gucci equation come swiftly. First we are presented with one of the earliest examples of the horsebit loafer, a classic black pair dating from the early 1960s. But pretty soon we are seeing what creative geniuses such as Tom Ford, who waved his wand over the brand in the 1990s, and Michele, who did the same from 2015, did with that once quietly chic piece of footwear: Ford’s loafers come in pink suede or rainbow patent with a skyscraper heel; Michele’s mule version is lined with fur; De Sarno’s are platforms and delivered in more patent, this time in that aforementioned Gucci Ancora red.
Portals consists of three interlocking circular installation spaces linked by revolving doors, a nod to the Savoy’s original entrance, carrying examples of Gucci’s most exquisite luggage designs
Ready-to-wear first appeared in 1981, but it was when Ford arrived that the dance between old and new accelerated. Gucci had quickly built up a wonderful richness of language, with its gallery-worthy floral prints and its veritable abundance of horsey references, the latter turned seductive in the hands of Ford and at times, under Michele, edging towards S&M. There are rooms that gather together highlights from those themes, referencing them further by way of theatrical mises en scène by Es Devlin.
But it’s the endless questing and reinvention in recent decades that’s at least as striking, whether that’s Ford’s cool-to-the-touch sexiness or Michele’s dressing-up box eclecticism. In one darkened space a cuboid cabinet of wonders — red, of course — opens and shuts to reveal myriad apparently contradictory delights.
These were men who did so much — who danced — for a brand that was, once upon a time, just about suitcases. I left thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes. Except the shoes our protagonists danced in were, of course, those horsebit loafers. And now it’s Sabato De Sarno’s turn.
Source : TheTimes
