Floria Sigismondi on Bringing the Breath Back to Fashion With Gucci’s Aria Film

Floria Sigismondi on Bringing the Breath Back to Fashion With Gucci’s Aria Film

Floria Sigismondi Photo: Kevin Tachman / Courtesy of Gucci

Alessandro Michele often refers to Harry Styles as his brother, signifying a bond deeper than art, fashion, or commerce. Floria Sigismondi, the Italian-Canadian artist, must be Michele’s sister then.

Sigismondi got her start in the ’90s directing moody, cinematic music videos for Björk, David Bowie, and Marilyn Manson. Eventually she moved on to feature films like 2010’s The Runaways and her upcoming The Silence of Mercy, as well as painting and photography. She’s partnered with Michele before on the short film 72 Hours in André Balazs’ Chateau Marmont With Kenneth Anger and on videos for Gucci Gifting and Gucci Bloom. Like the Italian designer she is an expansionist: Just as Michele proved that anything under his eye can be Gucci-fied, so does Sigismondi bring her haunting, tender spirit to all of her own work.

With Aria, Michele and Sigismondi tried to crack the very of-the-moment question: How can you make a runway show as thrilling online as it is in-person? Their solution wasn’t a direct translation of vibes. Instead, Sigismondi brought her music video expertise, injecting both a pulse (abetted by the array of pop songs that accompanied the film) and a narrative.

The video begins outside the Savoy Club, a nod to London’s Savoy Hotel where Guccio Gucci got the idea to launch a luggage business. Inside, models walk a camera-lined runway toward a paparazzi pit before flinging open the club doors on a phantasmagoric idyll where they commune with each other and the local animals. A reemergence narrative? Perhaps, or just the affirmation that nature and togetherness prevail over all else.

Gucci Aria. Soundtrack by Alessandro Michele, mixed by Lawrence Rothman.

Here, Sigismondi discusses the collaboration and shares some secrets of making a great fashion film.

Steff Yotka: You’ve worked with Alessandro and Gucci several times. How did you first meet him and what attracted you to his work?

Floria Sigismondi: The first thing we did together was Gucci Gifting, shot in the Garden of Ninfa, just outside of Rome. I had just started to be familiar with what he was doing with the house; he had just put a breath of fresh air into the fashion. I was just so impressed with the incredible playfulness. It was just something I was immediately drawn to, absolutely mesmerizing.

My mother actually grew up by the sewing machine. My parents were opera singers, and my mother was also a seamstress. She would watch The Sonny and Cher Show and then she would make Cher’s dress the next week. I love fashion, I love the idea of self-expression, and what I love about what Alessandro does is that you can take the collection, take it apart, and remake it as yours. It then becomes part of your personality and it tells your story—[wearing his clothes] you never feel like you’re dressed in something that doesn’t belong to you. That’s what I really love about what he does.

I came across this story about your parents and your mom being a seamstress earlier today and thought you and Alessandro must’ve had similar upbringings because he was also raised in a creative home. You must have had an instant connection with him.

Yes. And his mother is from Pescara, which is where I was born. Every time we are together he always laughs at my Pescarese accent! Alessandro’s father would also play the guitar every day for an hour. My father just passed away in February, and I was talking to Alessandro about how we lost the music in the house. He had a very similar story when his father passed away, the idea of how someone can bring sort of music to the family and you don’t know it until it’s gone. There’s something beautiful about that.

That’s a beautiful connection; I’m so sorry for your loss.

He lives on. He was 96 and he’s got a big personality that lives on.

Alessandro Michele Photo: Kevin Tachman / Courtesy of Gucci

How did the idea to work with Alessandro on the Aria collection film come about?

I got a call if I wanted to come to Cinecittà in Rome and do the project with him. I just finished shooting my film and was going off to Italy to see my mother, so it was perfect timing.

The way fashion shows are presented now are so different, it just opens up a new set of challenges: How do you do these kinds of films in a creative way? The challenge for me was: How do you have someone continue to be engaged and watch it for 15 minutes? You know, sometimes the runway show can feel repetitive, like once you’ve seen a couple of minutes you’re like, “Okay, I get the dress.” For me, I was just trying to keep people engaged in the promise of possibly something else beyond that dark room. You see people kind of going past the dark room at the end of the runway, loitering there, little things like that.

The main thing I was really excited about was the idea of Aria, which translates to the breath. I call [what we have experienced in lockdown] an incubation, a shared experience that we’re having across humanity of being locked up. The idea of Aria to me is the idea of the breath and taking a breath of fresh air. What I love about what Alessandro’s done is he’s introduced glamour at a time where it’s not really the first thing we’re thinking about.

The pacing is so crucial. You were talking about the breath, but it also felt like a heartbeat was coming back to fashion in terms of the film’s timing.

There is, like you said, a heartbeat, and I think what you’re feeling is the idea of touching and relationships presented. There are the beautiful, little human touches, like the two hands touching with a gentle caress or a wonderful kiss. Those were the things, I think, that make this film different.

Photo: Kevin Tachman / Courtesy of Gucci

How did you find working with Alessandro as a co-director?

It’s been really wonderful. There is a lot that is being said without words. We really connected.

For him, the idea of the love at the end of the film was very important. For me, it was about trying to find this relationship between humanity and nature and breathing, creating that poetic gesture between what the animals were doing and how the models can mimic that and extend that sort of dialogue.

As a director who has worked in different formats, do you feel like the fashion film provides you with a unique opportunity?

You can explore a frame of mind or you can explore a theme [in a fashion film], so it’s much more like music videos, I think. It’s not like you’re selling a product necessarily, it’s more about an idea, a theme, a concept. I think I would equate fashion films a little bit more to music videos than commercials. There’s something much more cinematic unexplored.

Logomania Is Coming For Your Face

Confined to small portraits on Zoom screens for more than a year, many have found alternative means for self-expression. Colourful hair, dramatic jewellery, and puff-sleeved tops have all been on the rise – the better to show off a little style on screen. Now, there’s another way to express yourself: monogram face jewellery.

This isn’t just about the new Prada triangle earring or Balenciaga’s logo shoulder-grazer. Both Gucci and Chanel have shown monogrammed facial jewellery in their resort 2022 collections, with tiny interlocked Gs dangling from a septum piercing and a CC charm hanging from a faux lip ring. The piercings are definitely fake – no commitment necessary – and definitely noticeable.

Rendered as they are in crystal, the intention seems to be to draw attention to previously unloved areas of the face, as well as to add a punkish influence to otherwise elegant fashion. Speaking with Vogue’s Hamish Bowles, Virginie Viard said the lip rings shown in her Chanel collection were an homage to the late, great Stella Tennant, a favourite model of Karl Lagerfeld known for her septum piercing in the ’90s.

Chanel resort 2022. Photographed by Acielle / StyleDuMonde

The trend for small, monogrammed bits and baubles doesn’t begin or end with nostrils and lips. Micro-monogram prints, like Versace’s new interlocking key motif and Gucci’s heritage Gs, are seeing an uptick in search and sales, according to reports like Lyst’s quarterly data drop. The most popular item of 2021 so far, per the search aggregator, is Gucci’s monogram puffer made in collaboration with The North Face.

We expect Fendi’s cursive F tights, Balmain’s geometric spiral blazers, and Givenchy’s G chain necklaces to soon join the most-wanted lists for autumn; small pleasures for a re-emergence wardrobe. The septum piercings and lip rings might be only for the brave… or the social media-savvy. A Chanel crystal kiss would look great on Instagram.

This article was originally published on Vogue.com.

Louis Vuitton’s Stephen Sprouse Collaboration Turns 20—And Is Still One of the Best Logo Hacks Around

But to many European heritage brands, the logo is sacred. A shorthand icon—and I mean icon in an almost sacrosanct, religious sense—a logo stands in, and up, for the philosophy and ideology of the maison as a whole. It’s the key to the codes, passed down through generations of designer-directors. Before you know the Chanel quilting, the gold-chain trim, or the camellia flower, you know the interlaced CC’s. (Pharrell and Frank Ocean both have verses about it.) Such holy legends aren’t to be tampered with. Well, at least not in most instances.

Gucci’s recent “hacking” of Balenciaga, in which creative director Alessandro Michele co-opted Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia’s signatures, refuted some of these ideas. The pairing happened not only on the runway, where crystal suits dripped in Gucci and Balenciaga logos, but off it too. Michele and Gvasalia’s text message chain, posted to Gucci’s Instagram Stories, was a stream of friendly banter, proving that stablemates can be besties, not competitors. Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault said of the partnership, “[Alessandro and Demna’s] innovative, inclusive, and iconoclastic visions are aligned with the expectations and desires of people today. Those visions are reflected not only in their creative offerings but also in their ability to raise questions about our time and its conventions.” Breaking fashion conventions seems to be good for business: On social media, fashion lovers heralded it for some of the season’s best pieces, a sign that new ideas can flourish in a bleak time.

Heritage and hacking, of course, comes down to ideas of ownership: Who gets credit for which silhouettes, graphics, and even vibes?