This past May, Gucci creative director Sabato De Sarno travelled to London to show his debut Cruise collection for the house, populating the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Tanks at Tate Modern with a ‘botanic tapestry’ of over 10,000 plants to backdrop a collection which married an urban uniform with flourishes of romance and craft. De Sarno cited Gucci’s ‘limitless capability to put together contrasts, make them converse, and find ways to coexist’ as inspiration, likening it to London’s topography, where frenetic urban streets meet expanses of green space and parkland.
‘I owe a lot to this city,’ he said at the time. ‘It has welcomed and listened to me. The same is true for Guccio Gucci, whose founder was inspired by his experience there.’ The latter is a reference to the house founder’s time at the Savoy Hotel as a porter, where observing the burgeoning travelling classes would eventually lead to him creating an eponymous luggage line on his return to Florence, Italy in 1921. ‘This is another piece of me, more romantic, more contradictory. I like taking something that we think we know and breaking away,’ he said of the collection itself.
Gucci Londra: a loving portrait of London and its contradictions
Now, a new tome released by the house – part four of a series called ‘Gucci Prospettive’ which was introduced by De Sarno at the start of his tenure – is a love letter to London and its contradictions, coinciding with the arrival of the Cruise collection in store. Drafting London-based duo Charlene Prempeh and Lewis Dalton Gilbert – who make up A Vibe Called Tech, a creative and art consultancy agency – to curate the book, its pages are filled with a collage of photography, artworks, song lyrics and text which speak to the city’s unique cultural melange, traversing decades, postcodes and perspectives. The book runs with the tagline: ‘We’ll always have London’, and is loosely based around the city being one of ‘dreamers’.
‘The agency started as a public engagement piece looking at the effects of technology on the Black community and has since evolved into both an art consultancy and a platform that looks to create healthy ecosystems for intersectional creativity in various spaces,’ explains Prempeh of A Vibe Called Tech’s beginnings. ‘I think that a want and a need to work with like-minded people was part of the catalyst to us working together... to establish a different way of working, a reaction but not a criticism to all of the roles we had held before,’ adds Dalton Gilbert. ‘We wanted to tell lesser-known stories.’
Ebony Horse Club, South London, 2020
Having collaborated with Gucci several times previously, and having both grown up in London, Prempeh and Dalton Gilbert were an apt fit to curate the publication, which spans a vivid spectrum of the city and its inhabitants. ‘London is really just very full of characters,’ says Prempeh. ‘When I talk about it being multicultural, I never just mean in terms of what countries people are from and their ethnicity, I think about the broadness of our collective interests. I love that because we’re exposed to so much culture, we really engage with it.’ The book itself is divided into four sections, ‘Dream Buildings’, ‘People Watching’, ‘Watching People’ and ‘Building Dreams’, which, as their names suggest, find intriguing similarities and contradictions in the catalogue of artworks.
‘There are some very pleasing pairings within the book’s layout, such as Vivek Vadoliya’s image next to Queen Elizabeth II,’ says Dalton Gilbert (Vadoliya captures a member of the Ebony Horse Club, a Brixton-based club which encourages riders from disadvantaged inner-city communities; Queen Elizabeth II is also on horseback). ‘It always makes me smile. It’s a reminder of how quickly this city can change from one street to the next, the different communities that coexist, the similarities they can share and the dynamic interplay that sparks inspiration.’
The Prince Charles Cinema, Leicester Place, London, 2015
‘As a Londoner born and bred, I owe London my life as it is and it’s a part of my DNA,’ he continues. ‘No matter how many times I fall out of love with it or spend the first two days on a trip abroad looking at property, whenever I come back, I can’t help but feel a familiarity and affinity with the chaos that coexists and I hope that comes through in this book.’
Gucci Prospettive, Gucci Londra is available from Gucci’s New Bond Street store, Reference Point, Shreeji Newsagents and Tate Modern.
