Gucci to stage next runway show in LA in November

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
May 10, 2021

Gucci plans to stage its next runway show in Los Angeles, the first time the Florentine marque has staged a show in the United States in six years.

 
To celebrate the brand’s centennial year, creative director Alessandro Michele has decided to stage Gucci’s next catwalk event in LA on Wednesday, Nov. 3, the brand confirmed Monday.
 
The show is timed to coincide with the 10th LACMA Art+Film Gala, scheduled for Nov. 6, where Gucci is the founding and presenting sponsor.

Back in 2015, Michele took his debut cruise collection for Gucci to New York,  unveiling it inside New York’s Dia-Art Foundation. Moving to the West Coast underlines how important Los Angeles is to both Michele and Gucci.
 
“Los Angeles (is) a city that continues to provide him a constant source of inspiration and which has played a significant role in Gucci’s hundred-year history,” Gucci said in its release.
 
The house stressed that the show in LACMA was very much part of “carrying on the series of happenings and unveilings in its centenary year.”
 
Last month, Michele feted the brand’s 100 years with a stellar show video named Aria, which contained multiple in-jokes and visual puns to the house’s founder, Gucci Gucci, along with a novel linkup with Balenciaga, a fellow brand in Kering, the giant French luxury group.

 
Gucci had previously made plans to stage last year’s cruise collection in San Francisco in May 2020, before the pandemic forced it to call off that event.
 
Michele has a well-honed tradition of staging Gucci catwalk shows inside storied locations and noted art centers. The Roman-born designer has taken Gucci inside the cloisters of Westminster Abbey for a Queen Elizabeth I rock-star show; and to the Palatine Gallery in Florence; Capitoline Museums of Rome and Promenade Des Alyscamps in Arles.
 
However, in April 2020, Michele announced via Instagram that he wanted to skip the official calendar of shows in Milan for the foreseeable future.
 
“I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call. We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story. Irregular, joyful and absolutely free chapters, which will be written blending rules and genres, feeding on new spaces, linguistic codes and communication platforms,” Michele wrote, in a major disruption.
 
The move meant Gucci became the second house within the giant luxury Kering group to decide, in the wake of the global pandemic, to exit the international runway season in both Milan and Paris. It joined Saint Laurent, Kering’s largest French label, which has not shown in Paris for the past several seasons.