Fashion's Homage to Revolution
Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele will pay homage to France by showing his next spring/summer collection in Paris, instead of its usual home in Milan.
The Italian fashion house announced that the September show will be the final in a three-part tribute to France, starting with an advertising campaign re-creating the 1968 student protests in Paris which are being mirrored somewhat by workers in France today.
The Paris student protests of May 1968 are an iconic symbol of the power of the youth counterculture in Paris in the 60s. Artists’ posters and radical graffiti were plastered over the city’s walls, and slogans such as ‘the future will only contain what we put into it now’, ‘boredom is counterevolutionary’ & ‘beneath the paving stones, the beach’ were used as rallying cries by the protesters.
The origin of the civil unrest began in crowded and poorly funded universities with a resentment of Western capitalist ideas and a dissatisfaction with the education system. To add fuel to the fire, workers across France joined the students on the streets adding low wages and oppressive employment methods to the list of woes which resulted in a strike comprising 10 million workers that brought France to a standstill.
Violent clashes ensued between police and protesters. Images of injured protesters and destruction of property quickly spread across the Western world. Although order was eventually restored, French President De Gaulle never recovered from the impact of the events that occurred and was voted out of office in the following year.
Gucci has published the first two spoilers for this campaign on their Instagram and you can see the complete short film in its entirety below.
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