Gucci Made Me Hardcore: or Less is Bore
Gucci Made Me Hardcore: or Less is Bore
Fee, fi, fo, fum, I hear the wit of an Englishman.
(Pronounce that with a British accent so that “man” rhymes with “fum.”)
While many of you, no doubt, are excited that your holey
Wolford tights can finally be put to good use (not for robbing banks, but in
imitation of John Galliano’s latest skullcaps and hairnets for Margiela, in 13
out of 33 looks! see http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2016-ready-to-wear/maison-martin-margiela/slideshow/collection#8), I’ve put on a different kind of thinking cap, slowly, and
I’ve come to the conclusion that….
What Mark Leckey is to the artworld, Mr Gucci is to fashion.
Let me unpack that: Mark Leckey is my all-time favorite
artist, Alessandro Michele my favorite designer. And in every way that Leckey
is the weird image prophet of the artworld, my Gucci pimp Alessandro Michele is
to fashion.
Here’s the weird thing. On the runway in Milan, the Gucci
theme was what Alessandro Michele declared as being influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s
rhizomatic thinking. What’s that, you might ask? All those random things in
life yoked together into a jacquard of thought, topped off with lots of
brooches, bows, furry patches to fondle in quieter moments at the cafe. Mark
Leckey’s thinking is of the same cloth: his work largely comprises the wildly
divergent image of thought, his own thought as informed by the internet, his own
biography in subcultural not-London, England, shaken, not stirred. And this is
why I think Alessandro Michele’s most recent “rhizomatic display” is more along
the lines of Deleuze’s Difference and
Repetition. Now where are we going with this. Be patient. I’m getting
there.
Let’s take that a little further. I’m a big fan of hats, and here Alessandro Michele has plugged into the cosmic energy I’ve been sending his way, a selfish plea for more millinery, please. No berets! (One has to fidget with them too much.) What did he come up with? A new take on Pharrell Williams's oversized Peruvian fedora (thanks to Vivienne Westwood), my favorite in the aforementioned sea-nymph green.
And this other veiled cappy (below), what’s that? I’m seeing
influences from Tudor England all over everything else (the pearl and jeweled details
on the clothing, the Henry VIII oversized shoulders) so I’m trying to place it
there and find instead influence from Burgundy, 15th century, in fact,
and it’s shaped too much like a vulva to be ignored:
While everyone decrees the influence of Catherine de' Medici
(whom short women of the world thank as the fairy godmother of high heels), I’m
sticking to my English version, the Tudors. It was Catherine, after all, who
gave up the fashion of wearing underwear in preference of really long knickers.
Ugh. (Michele himself says the influence was actually found in Dutch
paintings.)
Leckey became famous with his nightclubbing film “Fiorucci
Made Me Hardcore” in 1999. He said in an interview published, quite a
coincidence, at Rhizome magazine:
“What the title Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) still means to me is that to invest
all your energies into something as ultimately banal and fleeting as a jeans
label – Fiorucci was big in the 1970s and 1980s – creates this intensity that
is transcendent, that is beyond the brand and beyond the mundane everyday. It
takes you somewhere else, and that’s still where I want to go.”
That’s why I’m calling this feeling which has penetrated my
inner soul ever since last summer when I first saw the new Mr Gucci’s first
creations was this: “Gucci Made Me Hardcore.” It did! Alessandro Michele makes
me boldly go where I would have never gone before.
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| 14th century found object from Mark Leckey’s “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” |
Deleuze and Guattari tell us that “the brain itself is much
more a grass than a tree.” All I want to say, really, is that in our otherwise
really bleak world, Leckey and Michele plunder the Wunderkammers and come out
as unicorns: esoteric without being corny. Imagine that the rest of the world
had these kind of renewed Renaissance brains. The brains of a burnt medieval
book of laws manuscript? Backing away from the categorical tree-thinking of the
Enlightenment mutated into I-don’t-know- whatness. Rootless! And here I’ll go
out on a limb: No more passports. Then, and only then, would all be safe again.
In the meanwhile, I’m trying to make my
pink-suede-thin-braid headband look more Versace Fall 2016 (in 53 out of 58
looks), more Olivia Newton John. I don’t know why everyone is mismatching shoes
these days, from Miu Miu to Jacquemus, to Galliano, but I am loving it and,
yes: less is bore.
PS: By the way, Leckey seems to have pre-dated Gucci’s
penchant for Tudor England. At the risk of looking like Elton John, look at
this portrait of him wearing a pearl drop earring. It fits to Gucci’s Tudor
scheme. After all, it was fashionable around 1600 for men (daring, raffish men)
to wear a single earring. And that shirt. Looks like Versace. (And I later
learn: it is!)
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(Photograph Sarah Lee, March 2015, in The Guardian.)
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| (The young tyrant,
Charles the I of England, ca. 1612, based on other portraits of him at this time.)
See Gucci's Fall 2016 show at http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2016-ready-to-wear/gucci/slideshow/collection
And more Mark Leckey online here:
Fiorucci Made Me
Hardcore, 1999.
For a view into his installation at the Venice Biennale and
the aforementioned talking street furniture, newstand (pictured above) see
And where he imagines a talking refrigerator, “60,000 watts of
power, all alone, here in the dark…” see
GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction,
2010.
(C) 2016 April von Stauffenberg aka April Elizabeth Lamm
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