Gucci Spring Summer 2020 Advertising Campaign

Never underestimate the power of a triplet. Omnia tria divina sunt says the old adage. Even more so if the trio includes a horse. Is the longhaired, tailed equine a pet? A family member? A therapy aid? A nod to the enduring equestrian lineage in the Gucci DNA? A mythologic incarnation of some love-messaging deity? Maybe all of the above, maybe none.

One way or another, a horse features as the co-protagonist of the new Gucci advertising campaign. On the beach, in the kitchen, at the car wash, in the traffic jam, the horse is always there: getting a snack, swimming in the pool, washing shoes at the car wash, bringing the other two to destination and generally sharing moments with his or her… owners? There’s no owning in a relationship. The campaign is an exercise in warm-hearted ambiguity, an act of everyday surrealism, a celebration of the paradoxical.

Creative Director Alessandro Michele likes to push boundaries, and this season entrusted quixotical director Yorgos Lanthimos to do so, visually. The narrative plot is ultimately left to the viewers to outline. Each eye, a path. Lanthimos’s The Lobster, the dystopian movie in which single men and women not able to find a new life partner are transformed for eternity into their favorite animal, comes to mind.

The horse, thereafter, might just be a human, in a new incarnation. It is not to be forgotten, also, that Zeus used to take animal semblances when he wanted to seduce. Then again, horses are a symbol of freedom, and the Spring Summer 2020 Gucci show was all about the power of fashion to break the cage of rules with the self-determination of personal style. Their presence in the picture might just act as a reminder of that.

However one looks at the campaign as a whole, there is no way to get to the point, and that is exactly the point, which makes for a libertarian message: truth and style are in the eye and in the ways of the beholder. 

#OfCourseAHorse 

Creative Director: Alessandro Michele 
Art Director: Christopher Simmonds Photographer/ Director: Yorgos Lanthimos 
Hair Stylist: Paul Hanlon Make Up: Thomas De Kluyver 
Location: Los Angeles / Chateau Marmont