Détournement

SPRING 2016 MEN'S READY-TO-WEAR

MILAN, JUNE 22, 2015

The 10-cent word that defined today's Gucci show was détournement. It essentially means recontextualization. Is a granny's pussy-bow blouse still a pussy-bow if a willowy teenage boy is wearing it? Or is it, as today's show notes claimed, "a renewal of possibility"? The slightly impenetrable tone of those notes actually echoed the Situationists, the French anarcho-philosophers who were so inspirational to Malcolm McLaren in his creation of the Sex Pistols. And a similarly transgressive instinct was operating on the Gucci catwalk. Welcome to the New Punk. Asked about the religious symbolism in his collection, he talked about, "the young generation as the real saints of the new world." Tattooing, piercing, decorating themselves in a new kind of geography of the body—Michele takes all of these as youthful tokens of a new shamanism. And that certainly added a significant gloss to a collection in which decoration was a more accessible notion than recontextualization. If there was a masculine heart to each of those items, the defining details were eccentric old-ladyish. And this was Michele's most thrillingly audacious proposition. When he spoke about the young, he insisted he meant a state of mind, rather than a chronological point in time. "The very young and the very old want to be free," he clarified. And youth and age are both so much more liberating than that long, put-upon stretch in between. (…)Détournement pursues a new idea of beauty. And here it was, lush but confrontational. The New Punk.

by TIM BLANKS - Vogue.com