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Gucci – Androgyny with Ample Attitude

Androgyny - a tricky, yet ultimately enticing phenomena - was the first word that came to mind Saturday, Feb. 28, while viewing the fall 2009 women’s ready-to-wear runway show of Gucci, Italy’s biggest luxury brand.

Androgyny mixed with a large slice of saucy femininity was what made this collection so special - a series of clothes that ignored the doom and gloom of the current economic market and focused on a festive New Wave optimism. The show featured mannish clothing worn by beautiful android women whose ambiguity suggests brains, panache, an evocative private life and a hint of sexuality that makes the pulse beat faster.

Gucci’s creative director Frida Giannini is a woman whose creative wellspring is very much the early Eighties. That’s why her collections are so much more optimistic than any other in Milan. Giannini is a genuinely fine tailor – her pencil pant, chopped off Spencer jacket, broad lapel suits were fresh. Giannini cuts these suits with an understanding of a woman’s body and an intuition of how to make it work for the majority of women.

“I don’t see the collection as Eighties, I see it as contemporary,” Giannini insisted backstage, dressed like one of the models on her catwalk – in glittering anthracite leggings, under a crystal encrusted smock. She looked cool and alluring, just like her casting.

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