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Gucci Leaders Muse on Fashion Shows, Immediacy

Author: Elise Thornton
by Elise Thornton
Posted: May 03, 2016

NOW AND THEN: Guccimay be shaking up the fashion system with coed shows, but its chief executive Marco Bizzarri and creative director Alessandro Michele are dead set against see-now-buy-now.

The two men muse on multiple industry shifts in a 13,000-word article penned by Jonathan Wingfield — and illustrated with 50 pages of photos by Juergen Teller — in the next issue of System Magazine.

"Has anyone actually asked the customer if they want to have something available directly after the show? You hear that three bags are going to be released tomorrow in five shops, so you produce 15 bags. How many customers are you going to satisfy with that? Fifteen!" Bizzarri tells the biannual title. "Moving forward, if you want to stay away from fast fashion, I think personally we need to go in a completely opposite direction with what is being talked about."

The executive and Michele are united about the importance of fashion shows — to a point.

"From a branding standpoint, the show represents only a fraction of our business, and the impact you actually have on the consumer is super, super tiny. I mean, what about the pre-collection?" Bizzarri says. "That is just as important as the show. So let us use the show to tell a story, and then if we need to do something to be closer to the consumer, let’s make sure that the shops today are no longer these mausoleums where you are afraid to enter."

Adds Michele: "I love fashion shows: they’re the moment when you can give soul to the clothes. Otherwise, it is just a skirt. Fashion is about the dream and without the dream fashion doesn’t exist anymore. So I believe more and more in the fashion show, and I think that fashion needs to be more fashionable than ever before."

The issue makes its debut Tuesday at Dover Street Market and Colette before rolling out to newsstands on May 9.

Stirred by creativity and lured by the chance to carve a career in the fashion industry, they've come from as far away as Hawaii and as close as Brooklyn.

Their backgrounds are as varied as the places they still call home — when not attending classes atMarist College in the Town of Poughkeepsie.

But they all the shared the same goal. On Friday, four years in the the Marist CollegeFashion Program will culminate at the 30th Silver Needle Runway and Awards for Mackenzie Kramer of Brooklyn, Renee Pedigo of Oak Park, Illinois, and Taylor Harris of Hawaii.

The three Marist seniors, along with 10 fellow senior fashion design majors, will see their designs showcased inside Poughkeepsie's Mid-Hudson Civic Center. Between shows at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., more than 2,000 people are expected to attend.

Pulsating music, models that strut and pout and designs that provide one of our basic needs without sacrificing flair frame the Silver Needle Runway and Awards. For a few hours Friday, the Mid-Hudson Civic Center will be crowned with the dazzle of a high-end designer’s fashion show in Milan, Paris or London.

"Seeing a model on the runway — it’s unreal," said Pedigo, 22.

"You work so hard with your pieces and from day one, every student, it starts as a sketch or it starts as a dream or an idea and you develop it for so, so long," she said.

"Sometimes you almost get sick of it because you’ve been staring at it for four days..." she said.

At age 8, Pedigo staged photo shoots in her bedroom, with friends who dressed up in her mother’s clothes. Sewing classes in middle school followed, as did art classes in high school and fashion studies at a college in Chicago.

The path that Harris took to Marist can be traced back years to a dress she wanted to wear to an eighth-grade banquet. Her mother couldn't afford the dress, but agreed to pay for sewing lessons so her daughter could make the dress.

Now, the 21-year-old can reflect on a four-year journey that began in Maui and is ending in Poughkeepsie.

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"It was a pretty drastic change," she said. "But it was definitely exciting."

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Though she lives the closest, Kramer's path to Marist was perhaps the most circuitous

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Author: Elise Thornton

Elise Thornton

Member since: Aug 20, 2015
Published articles: 79

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