If there’s one channel that seems to be winning this fashion week season, it’s Snapchat. While Instagram still lives on as its polished and beautiful counterpart, Snapchat is increasingly becoming the preeminent channel to build hype for a designer, if only for the fact it feels so genuinely like you’re getting an inside look at something going on.
That raw and candid insight has so far proven valuable for the likes of Mulberry, with reveals of its show ahead of its London Fashion Week return, and for Tommy Hilfiger thanks to a takeover by supermodel Gigi Hadid. Meanwhile, Burberry upped the stakes even further with a big focus on storytelling created especially for the platform.
Over to Milan yesterday, and next up was Gucci, which used Snapchat to reveal its partnership with street artist GucciGhost, aka Trouble Andrew. You’ll have already spotted the actual collaboration pieces taking to the catwalk – graffiti on skirts, handbags and emblazoned across the back of jackets.
On Snapchat, Andrew was also seen creating his artwork around the show venue; both outside and as a backdrop for the models. Graffiti lives both in the real world and as designs on top of the Snapchat content. Once the show began, he also shared close-ups on his collaborative designs as they walked down the runway.
The relationship with Gucci came following Andrew increasingly using the #guccighost designs – a play on the interlocked GG logo – across his own social channels, as well as in wall art and on vintage clothing. The idea literally sparked from creating two holes in a Gucci sheet and going as the “Gucci Ghost” to Halloween one year.
As Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, told WWD: “I saw the way Trevor [Trouble Andrew’s real name] was using the symbol of the company and I thought it was quite genius. It’s completely different than the idea of copying. It’s the idea that you try to [take to] the street, through language like graffiti, the symbols of the company.”
Needless to say, it’s representative of the new way of creative thinking and revived spirit Michele is bringing to the Gucci house; all of which is making us obsessed with the brand once again.
“Certainly this is the boldest collaboration of a major brand with an artist since [the Louis Vuitton-Stephen Sprouse] series orchestrated by Marc Jacobs (Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince and Yayoi Kusama following Sprouse), and the flashiest. And it’s the first time a major fashion brand has enlisted an artist that it has so inspired to such an audacious degree,” writes Bridget Foley for WWD.
On Gucci’s Instagram, Michele was quoted as saying: “I took the most interesting things of @troubleandrew’s and I asked if I could re-customize them. I find it interesting that the GG pattern has made this circle around the world. I customized his work and he says I’m like a doctor who treats them, makes them better. He puts in his culture, I have mine. The two things together are good. Diversity always produces something interesting,”
He added: “Trevor’s language is authentic; Trevor is authentic. He lives in Brooklyn, he knows Gucci. The way he used the color, the way he’s translating our power is real. I wanted to put [his work] into the collection to give this kind of language real life; it’s just another face of the brand. And also, I love the idea of what is real and unreal.”
On his work being revealed, Andrew added: “I can’t wait for this stuff to come out. It’s validation for my craziness.”
