Gucci's Fall 2024 Campaign Prompts AOC's Research Into Lobotomies for Women
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Anne of Carversville never rushes to post the latest and greatest luxury market news. Rather, Anne lets certain campaigns and collections simmer on the back stove — especially when her response is deadly.
Unlike most fashion commentary websites, AOC frequently introduces politics and social movements into an analysis. This is how we roll, and today is no different.
As authoritarian movements rise worldwide, we refuse to let brands behave like LiMu Emu & Doug in Liberty Mutual Insurance commercial. We fight the tendency of putting our heads in the sand, as our biggest brands drive dangerously drunk down the luxury highway.
Gucci Creative Director Sabato De Sarno sits atop this campaign, as he methodically and slowly ponders his way out of the red-ink mess that is today’s Gucci brand.
AOC is clueless to where Sabato De Sarno is going, but our patience is short.
Watching Anne’s alma mater Victoria’s Secret flail in wild gyrations for five years — only to end up very close to where she left them years before — is an absurd reality for her.
There was no need for Gucci to plunge off a cliff in similar fashion, but they are speeding down the highway in a five-alarm fire. There is no Formula 1 driver at the wheel.
Time is beginning to blur in the Sabato De Sarno timeline from his September 2023 runway debut. AOC has no critique regarding the product, because we cannot get beyond the branding disaster that is Gucci, post Alessandro Michele.
Kering’s Financial Free Fall
Kering shares tumbled three weeks ago after the Gucci owner reported a sharp drop in second-quarter sales. Note that Kering’s problems are significant across its brands, but they are acute in Kering financial stallion Gucci, whose second quarter revenues plunged another 20%, on top of the brand’s 2023 bloodbath.
The entire luxury market is under financial stress today. Not all brands are equally impacted; and not all luxury brands have their heads in the sand. Some are positioned to weather out the storm — like Louis Vuitton. Others are in freefall.
Global luxury brands Gucci and Burberry are vying for first place in this sea of red ink. Gucci — with its strong, leather-goods business — should not be in the same car-wreck pileup that includes Burberry, who does not have iconic handbags.
Anne of Carversville is not an “I told you so” kind of website. Nor do I have all the answers to Gucci’s epic problems. I checked in with JingDaily this morning for the latest Gucci news from the Chinese luxury market perspective.
JingDaily and Daniel Langer’s View of Gucci
Luxury sector op-ed writer Daniel Langer serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Our similar viewpoints are formed by location and expertise.
If Langer was headquartered in Shanghai or Hong Kong, would his view be different about the Gucci reinvention? It’s possible, but he is operating under the Jing Daily umbrella and halo. Langer wrote yesterday, August 13, 2024:
Perhaps the worst-executed brand reset of recent times is unfolding at Gucci. In the past, I praised Gucci for being the benchmark in brand storytelling. It was provocative and inspiring—a brand about the art of unapologetic self-expression.
After Alessandro Michele left, all references to the past were eliminated, and a new Gucci emerged—more sophisticated from a product perspective but without a soul, without a story. The financial results over the past two years confirm what happens when brands don’t tell a client-centric story but focus too much on product.
Anne Enke and Daniel Langer share identical views on the disastrous reset underway at Gucci. My own past commentary about the Gucci reset surfaced again yesterday, writing about Rimowa and brand ambassador F1 champion Louis Hamilton.
Rimowa is deeply invested in storytelling, with an embrace of humanist global values. Gucci has abandoned its cultural creatives values under Alessandro Michele and embraces a more sterile, coldly-modern viewpoint under Sabato De Sarno. Obviously, Kering ownership embraces this strategy.
Not only has the Fall 2024 Campaign prompted AOC to investigate the history of brain lobotomies as a medical treatment for women disproportionally. Anne’s very high-grade, brain-wiring just recalled the extreme degree of misogyny in the Italian Futurist movement, launched in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Italian Futurism and the Place of Women
AOC has not addressed Italian Futurism specifically since the 2016 presidential election battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Misogyny ran rampant among the Bernie Bros [and drove me off most social media] and is now a key attribute of large numbers of America’s young white men, in particular.
The data I read last week explains why Elon Musk and Donald Trump got together on X last night. It was truly shocking to me, a seemingly-informed woman, to read how many young men today believe that the man should make all final decisions in marriage or a committed, long-term relationship.
The current ‘Gucci campaign models look like they have had lobotomies section is done’ — with its ‘modern’ history of treatments for women, more so than for men. Anne just sent an AI request to refresh AOC’s mind on Italian futurism and its attitudes about women, along with an embrace of brutalist design and minimal decoration.
Part 2 of the Gucci Fall 2024 campaign analysis will come at once, after digesting an AI update on Italian futurism research post 2016 US presidential election.
Gucci Lacks All Soul and Has Zero Empathy
One key fact that has dogged Gucci — in AOC’s pov — since Alessandro Michele left the brand in late 2022 is this one: There is NO AUTHENTIC EMPATHY at today’s Gucci. None.
There is NO SOUL, no inspiring, human CONNECTION. It’s a show horse.
Gucci is emotionally dead today. Reviving the brand becomes a greater challenge as months pass.
Like my thoughts around Victoria’s Secret, I have no desire to see Gucci fail. But when professionals cut open a luxury brand patient with a big heart and leave it bleeding profusely on the operating table for nearly two years, death is a real possibility. ~ Anne
