At fashion weeks in Milan and Paris, there’s usually a lot of unintentional twinning. It usually comes courtesy of the street-style industrial complex, where fashion houses lavishly gift influencers the same clothes and bags that are simultaneously on sale in stores. This is why you’ll see the same bag everywhere, or wonder how on earth so many people decided to get dressed in exactly the same outfit that morning. Truth be told, it can sometimes make something truly desirable seem entirely generic or overexposed. Fashion is supposed to make us feel like individuals, after all, and there’s a fine line between clothes that are tribalistic talismans of community, bringing people together and identifying shared interests, and those that are so commonplace that we lose any sense of identity and self-expression by wearing them.
Imagine what it must be like, then, being an identical twin. Gucci’s Alessandro Michele was raised by a pair of them: his mother Eralda, and his aunt Guiliana. Apparently, they were inseparable, even living next door to each other and raising each others’ kids, dressed in the same way, with the same hair — often confused for each other, even by their own children. “They were magically mirrored,” Alessandro wrote in a letter to accompany the show. “One multiplied the other. That was my world, perfectly double and doubled.” It’s clearly been on his mind, because only earlier this year, he and Jared Leto dressed up as as a pair of uncannily prim twins for the Met Gala.
For his latest show, Alessandro twins like these were the focus — not that the audience was able to tell at first. From our point of view, it was a regular show, with plenty of Gucci’s candy-confection clothes worn by a distinct array of models. Towards the end, however, a partition — covered in portraits of twins and doppelgängers by photographer Mark Peckmezian — lifted to reveal a parallel universe within the show. In an adjacent room, the other half of the show’s guests had simultaneously witnessed the same show, only on the other twins modelling identical looks. For the finale, the twins came together and held hands, walking in complete synchronicity to the sound of Marianne Faithfull’s dulcet baritone reading a poem that repeated “opposite/different”. It was a fashion Sliding Doors moment, a spectacularly trippy coup de théâtre that left some guests bewildered — Is it a mirror?! Are they real twins? — and prompted others to break down in tears.
From a logistical perspective, it’s incredible to think that 68 pairs of identical twins walked the show. It turns out that Gucci casted it at the annual Twins Day Festival, which takes place in Twinsburg, Ohio — a surprisingly real town about 40 kilometres southwest of Cleveland, founded in 1819 by identical twin brothers. A celebration of twins, it has attracted over 80,000 pairs of identical twins since it began in 1976. It offers a space to debunk a lot of the perceptions about twins. After all, they have fascinated artists and writers — and even street-style photographers (there are a surprising number of twins at shows). Stanley Kubrick drew on their uncanniness in The Shining, Diane Arbus made them a haunting subject in her photos. But on a lighter note, who wasn’t obsessed with Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap, and the idea that you could find a long-lost twin from another country?
Twins are symbolic of the closest kind of sibling relationship, which is why they fascinate us. And there’s something about the nature of siblings, so close and yet so different as life goes on, that feels emotional. There is something about what Alessandro called “the cracked symmetry” — though they look the same, they could be entirely different. “It’s the specular relationship between identity and otherness: the copresence of different subjects in connection,” as Alessandro pointed out. It made you wonder: What if, somewhere out there, there’s someone living an identical life to yours? What if there was another version of your life — even the way that you dress — that you could have lived?
Maybe that was Alessandro Michele’s point. His collections for Gucci are radical testaments to the power of individuality. There’s never a narrative throughline, per se, not in the way that some designers will be thinking about the Roaring Twenties or, say, Picasso paintings. Instead, each and every look is entirely its own — an individual character, rather than a cog in a wider machine. There are cowboys, goths, punks, princesses, ladies-who-lunch, pimps and hustlers. Every kind of iconic movie character, or fashion reference you can imagine. At Gucci, there’s an emphasis on being who you want to be — even if that’s a different person every day.
This collection was no exception — each look was monolithically delicious, so much so that it felt like a return to the earlier days of Alessandro’s reign at the house. Standouts included the excellent tailoring that Gucci has been consistently nailing, only this time with cut-out garters at the thighs for the 9-to-5 cowboy. Sequin-spangled boilers suits, ladylike tweed jackets and ruffled and jewel-toned dresses all took their cue from the 80s, which also informed some of the jarring clashes of saturated colours, prints and bright graphics. And there were some charming elements of folksy dress: long peasant skirts, flowing bows and pagan-tinged jewellery worn across the face — as well as spectacularly ornate Chinoiserie embroideries on silken kimonos and cheongsams. The list goes on really, all the way to Gremlins, which appeared throughout the show. Mixed, matched, and then chucked into an aesthetic blender and jumbled up again, it all somehow emerges looking unmistakably Gucci. Something for everyone, and sometimes everything for someone.
It all seemed to go back to that idea of individuality and identity; community and connection. We may all live with the false notion that we’re completely unique, but there are people just like us out there, living the same life and wearing the same clothes. Though that might may you feel inconsequential, it might actually be a good thing. We all need to feel a part of something — have a soul mate to hold our hand — especially when times get dark and the news gets bad.
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Images via Spotlight