This past May, Gucci creative director Sabato De Sarno travelled to London to show his debut Cruise collection for the house, populating the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Tanks at Tate Modern with a ‘botanic tapestry’ of over 10,000 plants to backdrop a collection which married an urban uniform with flourishes of romance and craft. De Sarno cited Gucci’s ‘limitless capability to put together contrasts, make them converse, and find ways to coexist’ as inspiration, likening it to London’s topography, where frenetic urban streets meet expanses of green space and parkland.
‘I owe a lot to this city,’ he said at the time. ‘It has welcomed and listened to me. The same is true for Guccio Gucci, whose founder was inspired by his experience there.’ The latter is a reference to the house founder’s time at the Savoy Hotel as a porter, where observing the burgeoning travelling classes would eventually lead to him creating an eponymous luggage line on his return to Florence, Italy in 1921. ‘This is another piece of me, more romantic, more contradictory. I like taking something that we think we know and breaking away,’ he said of the collection itself.
