Why are rich people so boring?
Gucci’s Sabato De Sarno showed luxury basics for — luxury basics. Bally and Bottega Veneta brought something new.
Column by Rachel Tashjian
September 22, 2024 at 4:55 p.m. EDT
MILAN — Do the wealthy people Gucci conjures up with its latest collection really dress so blandly?
Gucci is the flagship house of the fashion conglomerate Kering (which also owns Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta), and designer Sabato De Sarno has been attempting to reinvigorate the brand amid flagging sales. But his collections over the past year have been a depressing picture of one percenter style.
De Sarno says the right things, but he doesn’t have the skill or sophistication to achieve his aims. He promised beauty and polish for his first collection last year. “I started from the wardrobe, because I felt the urgency to put together the pieces that I like and that I don’t find,”
he told Vogue last year. Gorgeous wardrobe clothes are the stuff that have turned Hermès, The Row and Loro Piana into the fashion world’s most talked-about success stories, and if De Sarno had done that, he could been the mass answer complement to those snobbier behemoths: aspirational shoppers running around with Gucci scarves tied around their necks, ladylike Gucci bags slung over the shoulders of their $300 coats. Instead, he made stiff leather jackets, hot shorts and flat-looking cocktail dresses. The clothes had the smooth, rigid feeling of machine-made products rather than the seductive, soft humanism of crafted garments. And they didn’t boost sales:
Gucci’s sales fell 20 percent in the second quarter of this year.
Friday’s show was called “Casual Grandeur,” inspired by a phrase De Sarno heard used to describe Jackie O’s look. You can see where he was going with it: Her way of tucking a beautiful button-up into white trousers, her just-so trench coats, her belted skirts that grazed just above the knee. She made looking classy look hip, almost tossed-off but never bohemian. There was always a clean edge that set her apart from the other jet-set icons of the era, like the Jagger paramours and the Saint Laurent groupies. Her glamour was remarkably brisk. Again: a great idea for Gucci.
But De Sarno showed tank tops and jeans. He covered coats with pretty twists of beads that would relegate them to special occasions only, and paired suit jackets with universally unflattering bunched tulip miniskirts. Decent outerwear was nonsensically slashed just below the breast; there were oddball lingerie dresses and a couple of
hmmm raffia skirt suits. At the end, there was a strange series of anorak coats with enormous trains worn over a reprisal of jeans and tank tops.
These are luxury basics for luxury basics. And maybe that’s accurate: any viewer of “Succession,” “White Lotus” or “Big Little Lies” can tell you that wealthy people’s clothes these days are nothing to write home about.
Yet a fashion designer’s job is not to be a documentarian, but to shift our ideas about beauty and desire. And the collections should open the world of the label to a broader audience, even if most of us can’t afford these clothes. Remember how the late Bunny Mellon had the dullest trench coat lined in the most extravagant fur? You look at the style of today’s affluent class and think: for goodness’s sake, get a little creative!
Gucci’s clothes at the moment are just stuff. There is no emotion behind the technique. The pieces carry you nowhere. They veer between too obvious and too nonsensical. The opening look was a zip-up track jacket and blousy pants in what looked like gray suiting wool, with sneakers. Influencers have been wearing versions of that from Frankie Shop, Cos and Zara for five years now. Why do we need a high fashion designer to repackage and sell back to us a trend that’s already past its prime?
Too many brands are just making stuff. Donatella Versace has lost the groove she found last year when, seemingly out of nowhere, she starting making devilishly chic black suits and cocktail dresses fit for Monica Vitti playing a duplicitous widow. Ferragamo’s Maximilian Davis once again sent out a million (okay, 65) dresses, leather coats and suits that were pretty but not spectacular, many of them weighed down by the enormous handbags the house needs to sell. (Who wears a bucket bag with a sequin cocktail dress?) Diesel, Glenn Martens’s denim playground, had fabulous techniques, like shredded jacquards, but the too-big collection and snail’s pace of the runway show gave his spiky ideas that just-stuff feeling.
Clothes have always been marketing for bags, which account for the bulk of sales for many luxury brands, but the bags aren’t great either. Ferragamo’s are ungainly, with big flaps of leather weighing them down; Gucci showed a beautiful update of the bamboo bag it first introduced in 1947, which actually underscored how genuinely cool it would be if De Sarno decided to class up the Gucci joint.
Too many brands seem to be just doing a show because hey, it’s September, and that’s when you do another show. You wonder if somewhere in the designer food chain, there’s a little mustachioed fellow sliding hysterically between the gears trying to make pointless lingerie dresses, “Modern Times”-style.
At the end of the show, De Sarno took his bow by walking the entirety of his extensive runway. Designers usually just dart out and give a shy wave to the cameras. Maybe he knows his days at Gucci are numbered, and he wanted to savor the moment.
Mediocrity always raises important questions, though, and at Milan Fashion Week that question was: shouldn’t having money — having the time and resources to access beautiful things — be
fun?
