Raising the curtain on the Gucci Love Parade collection designed by Alessandro Michele, Gucci staged a fashion show on Los Angeles’ iconic Hollywood Boulevard. For the occasion, the eclectic cast walking the runway included: Jared Leto, Jeremy Pope, Steve Lacy, Grace Johnson, Jodie Turner-Smith, St.Vincent, Miranda July, Phoebe Bridgers, Janaya Khan, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Macaulay Culkin, and Hayden Pedigo.
NINE LETTERS DRIPPING WITH DESIRE
Mum worked in the film industry as an assistant in a production company. I remember all the stories she told me, and the details and the sparkles, about that dream factory. There was the alabaster paleness of Marilyn Monroe and her diaphanous voice. There were the black satin gloves of Rita Hayworth and Veronica Lake’s velvet hair, as well as the bewitching allure of Rock Hudson and Kim Novak’s dizzying transformative power. Everything felt like a fairy tale.
Back then, we lived in a squat in the outskirts of Rome. I needed to be able to breathe. Those subversive tales helped me in piercing the grayness. That was my escape, my desertion. Down in that tiny speck in the world, HOLLYWOOD seemed a bright and shiny star. Nine letters dripping with desire.
When I started thinking about the way I wanted to celebrate this new chapter in my adventurous job, I thought about mum and her precious legacy. I thought about the worship of beauty she fed me with. About the indefeasible gift of dreaming and the mythopoetic aura of cinema. This is why I chose Hollywood Boulevard.
This boulevard of stars lends perfect support to my uncurbed love for the classical world. Hollywood is, after all, a Greek temple populated by pagan divinities. Here actors and actresses are acknowledged as heroes of the myth: hybrid creatures with the power to hold divine transcendence and mortal existence at the same time, both the imaginary and the real. They are the idols of a new contemporary cosmogony, embodying a persistence of the sacred. Aphrodite, Theseus, Pandora and Medusa still live in Hollywood’s Olympus. Beyond reach, and yet, so human.
All around these demigods unfolds the city of angels, where a blessed light streams throughout. This is where I met the most peculiar people, out of time, refractory to any idea of order. I have always observed them as in procession at the slopes of the acropolis of dreams. Eager to offer themselves as gifts of uniqueness. A parade of enchanted and deeply free beings that go across a land where neither past nor future reside: only the miracle of the imaginative flair. Mum always told me about it: Los Angeles shines in its own magic, which is timeless; it’s a place that brushes the divinities, becoming a mythology of the possible.
Alessandro
