Forget everything you thought you knew about fashion exhibitions – Gucci Cosmos is something else entirely. This immersive, discombobulating, roving showcase celebrating the storied Italian brand’s 102-year history debuted in Shanghai this spring, and a new iteration of it has now landed in London, bringing both never-before-seen archival designs and surreal conceptual art to the Strand’s 180 Studios. Instead of a chronological study of the house’s most memorable designs, its creators – artist Es Devlin and fashion theorist Maria Luisa Frisa – offer a boldly experimental approach, plunging visitors straight down the proverbial rabbit hole and into the eye-popping Gucci universe: a labyrinthine series of tunnels and rooms featuring everything from projections of galloping horses that pay tribute to Gucci’s long-standing obsession with equestrianism, and sleeping giants in Tom Ford-era Gucci suits, to an eerie, all-white garden of Eden which examines the importance of floral motifs in the brand’s designs.
As the exhibition opens, we present the seven things you need to see, below.
The otherworldly “ascending room”
After you walk past the mirror-image domes outside 180 Studios – reproductions of Florence’s Duomo, and a reference to the birthplace of Guccio Gucci and the city where he founded his artisanal luggage atelier over a century ago – and step through its doors, you’ll find yourself in an elegant hotel lobby with golden light fixtures and chequered marble flooring. This is a recreation of the foyer of The Savoy, where a young Guccio Gucci worked as a porter in 1897, an experience which fostered his obsession with luggage and prompted him to turn his hand to creating bags himself. It’s from here that you enter the world of Gucci, via a bright red, lacquered lift that’s a reproduction of the one in The Savoy, the first electric elevator in London which was unveiled in 1889 and referred to as “the ascending room”. As the doors close and the mirrors inside transform into screens that show the elevator moving up, a voice explains the shock it inspired in visitors who’d never ridden in anything like it before. Brandy was served to ease their seven-minute journey up to their suites, and as they sipped, Guccio had plenty of time to observe them and their suitcases.
The tribute to equestrianism – complete with galloping horses
Once you exit the lift, go down a flight of stairs, and through a set of revolving doors that, unsettlingly, seem to go on for longer than is normal, you’ll enter a bright white room containing sculptural renderings of suitcases lit up with projections, including one of Princess Diana carrying her bamboo handle Gucci tote in the ’90s. Beyond this room is another space containing moving circular conveyor belts upon which sit Gucci travel bags and suitcases dating from the ’20s to today. (Don’t miss the golf club carrier and the printed ’50s suitcase with the matching thermos holder and picnic set.) Past this is a curved corridor lined with double G logos which contains a timeline of Gucci’s history, from the foundation of the brand to its evolution under its various creative directors, from Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele to Sabato De Sarno. It’s then that you come to the equestrian room: a celebration of the sport’s influence on Gucci’s designs which contains cabinets full of ’60s horsebit-laden loafers and belts, as well as a Michele-designed leather bustier paired with a bag with a leather whip handle that resembles a horse’s tail. Then, suddenly, the lights go down and the screens around these archival treasures show horses galloping frantically around the room.
The ice-white garden of Eden
There’s something both heavenly and vaguely eerie about the next room you come to: an all-white garden of Eden with mirrored walls, and giant insects and delicate flowers hanging from the ceiling – the latter a nod to the flora and fauna that adorned the silk scarf created for Princess Grace of Monaco by Rodolfo Gucci in collaboration with Italian illustrator Vittorio Accornero de Testa in 1966. That pattern became the leitmotif for a Gucci collection in 1981, and has since been reinterpreted by subsequent creative directors, from Frida Giannini to Sabato De Sarno. Walk around the space and you’ll spot the printed dress Giannini created for Gucci’s Flora fragrance campaign, a floral Jackie bag by Tom Ford, and crystal-studded leather boots from Alessandro Michele.
The jaw-dropping suited giants
Wind your way out of the garden and you’ll come face to face with two gigantic sleeping figures: a pair of 10-metre-tall white statues made of lightweight resin which hover just above the floor and act as blank canvases for a hallucinatory set of projections that place Gucci suit designs from across the decades onto them. You’ll see them don Giannini-designed checked suits with cinched waists, sparkly floral suits by Alessandro Michele from 2016, and Tom Ford’s unforgettable red velvet creations from 1996, famously worn by Gwyneth Paltrow and reimagined by Michele in 2021. All the while, you’ll also hear the slow, hypnotic voice of Es Devlin, one of the show’s creators, reciting a poem that she herself has written. As she whispers, “There is a cosmos in you,” you’re sure to feel a shiver going down your spine.
The incredible archive room
Past the giants, walk towards the light emanating from the bright blue room nearby – this is a surreal, maze-like rendering of the Gucci archive in Florence, with mirrored walls and ceilings, mysterious frosted cabinets with hidden treasures, and countless drawers to dig through. Inside are images from vintage advertising campaigns, sketches, and reproductions of illustrations by Vittorio Accornero de Testa, while on the shelves above them sit some of the house’s most iconic bags – the Bamboo, the Jackie, the Horsebit, the Gucci Diana – from their earliest iterations to the most modern versions, including the shiny Jackie Notte and patent leather Bamboo styles seen in Sabato De Sarno’s spring/summer 2024 collection.
The wondrous cabinet of curiosities
The exhibition’s pièce de résistance can be found in the adjoining section: a cavernous circular room which holds a giant, rotating red cube. Take a seat by the side and you’ll see drawers and cabinets slowly spring open to reveal a stunning range of Gucci artefacts: a Tom Ford-era electric guitar, say, or metal duck figurines from the ’70s, an array of Gucci perfumes and lipsticks, crystal headpieces, or the golden Giannini-designed evening gown Keira Knightley chose for the London premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean in 2006, as well as stage and red carpet looks worn by the likes of Harry Styles, Elton John and Sinéad Burke. The sections then slide back inside, and others are revealed in turn as a rhythmic, thumping soundtrack seems to mimic a human heartbeat. The effect is truly mesmerising. From here, you then enter the “carousel”, a room with an extended gliding runway of Gucci looks from the ’70s to today, on which abstract illustrations are projected.
A glimpse into Gucci’s future
Eagle-eyed Gucci fans who live-streamed Sabato De Sarno’s debut collection for the house will note the similarity between the bold vermillion hue of his Gucci Hub runway set and the “Gucci Ancora” room. Here – to deep sensory effect – De Sarno celebrates the Rossa Ancora shade of red idiosyncratic of his newly minted design tenure, with a striking semi-transparent parallelepiped structure featuring projections of personal memories and phrases projected onto the walls. In an exhibition defined by visionaries of the past, archival treasures and iconic emblems, this room celebrates De Sarno’s visual manifesto for the future – one which the audience can engage with using the semi-transparent cards which line the room’s walls, with words that they can manipulate into sentences at will.
Gucci Cosmos is at 180 Studios until 31 December.
