You no doubt already know about the major casting stunt that Gucci pulled during Milan Fashion Week. For his SS23 collection for the house, Alessandro Michele sent 68 pairs of identical twins down the runway. Our first thought? Where the hell did the casting team manage to find a full Gucci Gang of twins?! Well, they headed to a town in Ohio called Twinsburg – also the name of the collection – which, since 1976, has held an annual twin festival that boasts the largest gathering of twins in the world. Here, they began their search amongst the thousands of pairs.
Alessandro’s affinity for twins dates back to his earliest years. His mother Eralda had an identical twin Giuliana, who the designer also cites as his mother, describing them as “magically mirrored” and dressing the same. For Alessandro, his fascination stems from “the impossibility of the perfectly identical” and “the deception of similitude” – after all, despite their indistinguishable genomes, there will always be a freckle or a millimetre out of place.
In what felt like an eerie conceptual twinning, just a few hours after Gucci, Sunnei staged a show where models emerged from the audience and onto the catwalk before disappearing behind a white revolving door. Seconds later, their doppelgänger walked back out onto the catwalk wearing an entirely different look. Reminiscent of The Prestige, the clone-like casting created an illusion that would shock, impress and confuse those watching, playing into the idea of mysticism and the wonder of total uniformity.
Granted, this wasn’t the first season to see twins take to the runway. The closing looks at Comme des Garçons SS11 were worn by three sets of twins – at first appearing as two separate entities, but upon further inspection were bound together as one sculptural body, delicately held together by fragile threads. For John Galliano’s eponymous SS06 show the designer used 4 pairs of identical twins amongst real-life couples – who had purposely been cast because of their striking visual differences – placing them amid a landscape of oddities. Jun Takahashi’s SS04 Undercover show used identical twins to first give a visual of uniformity, before then honing in on the dangers that can come with it. The finale saw all of the twins come together wearing t-shirts that read “Who wants to be a soldier”, “Violence incites violence” and “Silly to kill”. And although Marc Jacobs didn’t use twins for his SS13 Louis Vuitton show, the theatrical impact of having Stepford wife-esque near-clones walking side-by-side, paired with the towering escalators, the meticulous attention to detail and the giant checkerboard floor, still played on our obsession with likeness.
In fashion, an archetype is created with the intention and hope that it will be replicated and trickle down to the masses. Duplicity on the catwalk not only offers a visual depiction of this, showcasing the idea of an original and a copy, but also makes you question if the two can coexist.
In the Gucci Twinsburg show notes, Alessandro wrote that the intention behind his casting choice was to illustrate a “rift in the idea of identity”, breaking down the notion of singularity, and wanting “sisterhood” and “co-belonging” to prevail. So the next time you’re out and about and someone’s wearing your outfit, don’t flee with horror – own it. Twinning is in.
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Images via Spotlight