Yesterday, Gucci presented the Fall/Winter 16 Women’s collection, which took place at an abandoned railway station in Milan. This season, Alessandro Michele continues his philosophic take on fashion, naming the collection Rhizomatic Scores, an idea taken from French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the collection notes, we see the same diagrammatic image presented to us on Deleuze and Guattari’s text, A Thousand Plateaus (and this happens to be one of the theorists I am using in my PhD thesis too!). The reference point for this collection, is,  as the name suggests, a “rhizome” – something that neither operates in chronological order, or has a “centre” but something that is in constant flux, with several variations and multiplicities.

As such, each look of the FW16 collection are references of each other, and then becomes part of an ‘unexpected’ flow. This concept, was also seen in the bags that came down the runway, with the old also bearing some elements of the new, and therefore produces a different variation, but yet with distinct references to those silhouettes of the past.  The Dionysus top handle bag now comes with a Bamboo, and the Jackie silhouette now also bears a Dionysus clasp. As for the GUCCI emblazoned leather bag, this was yet another familiar style, but this time, graffitied with “REAL”. In short, the what can be said about the bags, is the colloquial phrase, “same same, but different”.

These bags certainly make a statement. For the bag on the right, “L’ Avelugle”, translated from French, means Blind. These bags remind me of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s work about how it is impossible to tell the “real” (i.e. the original piece) from the “copy” these days because as Fight Club aptly puts, “everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”, that we have become L’Aveugle , that is, “Blind” to all this. Although Baudrillard certainly wasn’t talking about counterfeits vs the original, but more so the original idea of an object – e.g. how we all nowadays have been blinded by capitalism because we think that all chairs are different, when in essence, a chair is just that no matter how different it may look – it could be possible that social commentary this might have been what Michele had in mind, given his penchant for philosophising fashion.

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If you missed the FW16 show LIVE, you can still catch it right here via the on-demand video service!

Images via Vogue Runway