It’s Gucci’s third transitional show since creative director Alessandro Michele left in November last year.
Seoul’s 600-year-old Gyeongbokgung Palace was the spectacular venue on Tuesday, May 16, of Gucci’s Cruise 2024 fashion show. The Italian fashion house marked its first major fashion show in South Korea and the 25th anniversary of its first store in Seoul. (In 2021, it opened a new 1,000-sqm. flagship store in Itaewon.)
Gucci is the first major house to produce a runway show in South Korea’s largest palace compound.
Seoul in recent decades has become an epicenter of fashion, multiculturalism, global blockbuster series and movies, and has amassed a worldwide following for its hallyu stars.
Among the celebrities that have been appointed Gucci ambassadors are NewJeans’ Hanni, who starred in this year’s Gucci Horsebit 1955 campaign; actress and singer IU, who joined the luxury label in 2022; and Squid Game actor Lee Jung-jae who joined Gucci in 2021.
Gucci’s Cruise 2024 is the third transitional show since Alessandro Michele left in November 2022 after seven years as creative director. His designs for Gucci were marked by opulence and eccentric maximalism.
Newly appointed creative director Sabato De Sarno will begin his era in Gucci in November for Spring 2024.
The fashion house earlier said the off-season collection would feature “silhouettes evocative of Gucci in the late 1990s” and it did! Sophisticated cuts on overalls, metallics, puffy sleeves and cutoffs were among the design elements of the 60-piece collection.
But what really turned heads were the skateboard bags: both metallic and covered with the Gucci monogram.
Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri said, “Gyeongbok Palace is one of those wonders of the world that made us feel an instant connection with Korean culture and the people who created it — Florence and Seoul, Italy and Korea, so far away on the map but so close in the creation of wonder. This is why we are honored to present our Gucci Cruise 2024 collection here: celebrating the past, as inspiration for the future.”
