Gucci Cosmos, the immersive exhibition celebrating the Italian fashion house’s 102-year history, has opened its doors in London. The exhibition, which first debuted in Shanghai in April, is now on display at 180 Studios on the Strand, where it will run until December 31, 2023.
Curated by Italian fashion theorist and critic Maria Luisa Frisa and designed by British artist Es Devlin, Gucci Cosmos takes visitors on a journey through the house’s history. It is not simply a retrospective. It is an immersive experience that invites visitors to step into the Gucci world and explore its many facets. The exhibition features a wide range of objects from the Gucci archive, including clothing, accessories, handbags, and luggage, as well as archival materials such as photographs, sketches, and advertising campaigns.
In addition to the fashion exhibits, Gucci Cosmos also features a number of immersive installations. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a large-scale reproduction of the Savoy Hotel’s famous red lift, the first electric elevator in London. This meticulous recreation transports visitors back in time to the early 1900s, when Guccio Gucci worked as a porter at the Savoy.
Es Devlin: “As a creative endeavour and expression of the times, the House and its history over the past century can be mapped through an ability to evolve and, more broadly, to expand on the mutability of our own consciousness and ability to make cognitive shifts. Rather like a garment itself that is able to be changed and re-tailored, like a shed skin that constantly renews itself. For the exhibition’s iteration in London, I wanted draw on the city’s pivotal role in the House’s origin myth in which a young Guccio Gucci rode up and down the red lacquered ‘Ascending Room’ at The Savoy where his interactions with guests and their exquisite luggage would go on to forge his future.
Maria Luisa Frisa: “Gucci Cosmos, a project in the form of an exhibition inaugurated in Shanghai and now located in London, was an extraordinary opportunity for me to traverse the universe of Gucci through an ever-different lens. And I was able to tell its story through the clothes, objects, elements, people, and contexts that made this brand iconic and a trailblazer within fashion and collective visual culture for over a century. It is a challenge to work on an exhibition that evolves based on different spaces and the atmosphere of the cities that host it, and therefore demands reflection on the special connection between London and fashion, to reconfigure the relationship between the elements and the selection of objects. Gucci Cosmos is an immersive expository experience in which the origin story and history itself are continuously put to the test by the imagination of the future.”
The exhibition features a variety of immersive installations, sculptures, and multimedia artworks that explore the house’s signature motifs and its forward-thinking spirit. Gucci Cosmos exhibition is open to the public from October 11 to December 31, 2023
All photography courtesy of GUCCI
