Can't Travel To The Blockbuster Gucci Garden Exhibition In Florence? We Bring It To You
Because you know, Covid.
Turning the big 100 in the middle of the pandemic has made Gucci come up with some of the most extravagant and innovative ways to celebrate.
In between screening the Aria collection in April, which saw creative director Alessandro Michele "hacking" Demna Gvasalia's design codes at Balenciaga, and prepping for a centennial show in Los Angeles in November, the brand has launched a blockbuster exhibition at its Gucci Garden building in Florence.
Michele chose to curate the Gucci Garden Archetypes exhibition around ad campaigns "because they are the most explicit journey into my imagery".
Titled Gucci Garden Archetypes, the multimedia exhibition is an ode to some of Michele's most memorable campaigns for the house ever since he took on the reins as creative director in 2015.
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Spread across the many rooms of the Gucci Garden are 15 imaginative hyper-real scenescapes that were plucked from ad blitzes such as the Glen Luchford-directed Spring/Summer 2016 campaign that was inspired by Berlin nightlife and took place in a pink restroom.
A scenescape from the Spring/Summer 2016 campaign.
While fans may not have the luxury to experience Gucci's visual playground that's filled with graffitied walls and mythical ark-builders, intergalactic explorers, horses, dancers, angels in the flesh, Gucci Garden is hosting a virtual tour of the exhibition for two weeks only starting May 17.
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Ahead, we bring you a glimpse of what you can expect to see from this sensorial experience.
Access to the exhibition is through an operations centre where visitors get a split-screen live view of the world they are about to enter.
A museum-style diorama featuring a dinosaur, aliens and explorers captures the essence of the outer space-themed Fall/Winter 2017 campaign.
This LA subway carriage is a throwback to Alessandro Michele's first campaign for Fall/Winter 2015.
This floor-to-ceiling glass-shelved room pays homage to the obsessive collections featured in the Fall/Winter 2018 campaign. Among the paraphernalia in the space are 1,400 cased butterflies, 110 wigs and 182 cuckoo clocks, and numerous plush toys.
Get on the dancefloor in this room dedicated to the Pre-Fall 2017 campaign. That ad featured an all-black ensemble of dancers which Michele describes as a "homage to the elegance of black culture".
Enter a mirrored labyrinth that reveals the stately home in which the Cruise 2016 campaign was set in.
In this space dedicated to the Fall/Winter 2016 campaign in Tokyo, 150,000 shimmering sequins blanket the walls while the trippy truck that the model rode on for a joyride around the city takes pride of place here.