While both Gucci and Balenciaga have thus far been quiet on such talk, you may have noticed chatter surrounding a rumored collaboration between the two in recent days.
On Thursday, Gucci is set to reveal its new Aria collection, with intel on what to expect having been predictably kept under lock and key. However, as Women’s Wear Daily and Business of Fashion (among others) have noted, Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele is widely rumored to have linked up with Balenciaga and its creative director, Demna Gvasalia, on the new collection.
The Aria collection will mark Gucci’s first of 2021 and is expected to be unveiled via a series of short films on April 15.
Last year, Michele—in a mid-pandemic post to the official Gucci site titled “Notes From the Silence”—shared excerpts from his personal diary in which he reflected on how 2020 had put him deeper in tune with a desire for creative metamorphosis.
“As for me, in my own small way, I feel the urgent need to change a lot of things in the way I work,” Michele wrote in an excerpt dated April 7, 2020. “I have always been professionally inclined to change, after all, bringing with me a natural and joyful creative restlessness. But this crisis has somehow amplified such transformative urgency, which can’t be deferred anymore.”
Last November, Gucci featured its new collection in a miniseries helmed by Michele and director Gus Van Sant. The seven-part OUVERTURE of Something that Never Ended experience starred Silvia Calderoni, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, Florence Welch, Sasha Waltz, Paul B. Preciado, Achille Bonito Oliva, Darius Khonsary, Lu Han, Jeremy O. Harris, Ariana Papademetropoulos, and Arlo Parks.
