Gucci Fall 2012

If there’s something Gucci stands for as a brand, it’s decadence, but q4 Frida Giannini placed its aesthetic right into a very different historical context than the familiar, hard-edged sexiness of the nineties or the brittle, shiny geometry of last season’s Deco-flapper collection. Instead, she’d found her inspiration inside the Pre-Raphaelite period, recasting Edward Burne Jones’s consumptive heroines as modern girls with plum-stained lips, bleached eyebrows, with their hair drawn clear of their pale faces and twisted into flowing tendrils. The garments they wore evoked a darkly poetic opulence-occasionally nymphlike, but with the fragility counterbalanced by references to a briskly dandy-ish masculinity with a touch of swaggering World War I militaria. It made for an in depth and sundry flow of sophisticated clothes, softer and richer in tone, in a show which also encompassed the emerging ideas in fall’s fashion narrative. It made for Giannini’s best collection yet.

A girl in glasses opened the show, wearing an extended, narrow black velvet skirt with an oversize military jacket slung over her shoulders. As you turned to monitor her walking away, she showed a flash of black-stockinged leg from a deep slit behind the skirt. Thus, the Gucci girl preserves her reputation as a femme fatale, but carries it off in a haughtily detached, “not-trying-too-hard” effort to be sexy.

From then on, Giannini worked with flocked velvet in floral patterns harking back to William Morris, tapestry-inspired jacquards, and printed silks, turning out fitted sheath-dresses (another trend, done) and pajama-style pantsuits and smoking jackets, all emphasizing texture in a palette running from black to burgundy and deep bottle-green. She’s always liked a jodhpur-style pant and a flat boot-portion of Gucci’s equestrian heritage, too, needless to say-and when she threw a big pekan  fur military overcoat on a type of looks, it was amazing.

As for evening? The grand sweep of Gucci’s options-from an off-the shoulder emerald-green silk-and-velvet gown with poetically ballooning sleeves and a ribbon-tie sash, to a wrapped chiffon burgundy dress, sliding off one shoulder and trailing ruffles, to the six extraordinarily semi-nude, black tulle dresses embroidered with flowers-may have Oscar-going actresses’ stylists frantic to book options.

For a whole profile and additional information on Frida Giannini, visit Voguepedia.com.