Inside Gucci Cosmos, the house’s magical Es Devlin-designed exhibition in London

Welcome to the Gucci Cosmos: a travelling exhibition from the 102-year-old Italian house that lands in London tomorrow (11 October 2023). The show transforms 180 Studios, at brutalist landmark 180 The Strand, into an immersive exploration of the house archive, curated by Italian fashion critic Maria Luisa Frisa to recall the celestial patterns found in constellations and time travel through the house’s past, present and future. 

Arriving to coincide with Frieze Week (Frieze London 2023 opens for previews on 11 October, the fair’s 20th anniversary), the exhibition was shown in its first iteration in June 2023 in Shanghai, China, featuring dramatic set pieces by Es Devlin and an expansive array of objects from the Gucci archive. Devlin returns once again for Gucci Cosmos in London (hot on the heels of her contribution to U2’s show at the Las Vegas Sphere), the British artist and set designer creating various ‘worlds’ in the exhibition space – from gleaming corridors evocative of surreal clothing archives to a room filled with floating flowers and bees to evoke Gucci’s signature ‘Flora’ motif.

Inside Gucci Cosmos at 180 Studios, London

The exhibition begins, though, with a simulacrum of what is arguably the birthplace of Gucci: the red-lacquered elevator of the Savoy Hotel, where house founder Guccio Gucci worked as bell boy as a young man at the end of the 19th century. There, he witnessed the growing need for luggage among the upper classes in a fast-changing world (as the Gucci Cosmos guides elucidated, the lift was the first of its kind in London and took seven minutes to ascend its heights, during which guests would be served drinks and entertained with music). It was an experience he brought back to Florence, where he founded Gucci as a luggage maker in 1921 (today its artisans are trained at the nearby Gucci ArtLab), and the house’s origins are nodded to at Gucci Cosmos with a recreation of the Santa Maria del Fiore church’s Brunelleschi-designed dome sitting at the exhibition’s street-level entranceway. 

A labyrinthine series of revolving doors leads the viewer through the exhibition’s various rooms and worlds, which often feature immersive elements. ‘Portal’ looks once again towards the brand’s origins in travel with a gently rotating luggage belt – complete with suitcases, trunks and hat boxes, both archival and from recent designers at the house – while ‘Zoetrope’ evokes photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 moving-image invention with swirling footage of horses that emerge as apparitions across equestrian-inspired pieces from Gucci’s various eras.

'Two', meanwhile, sees a pair of enormous white resin figures – each lying sideways and inspired by the sense of wonder evoked by Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels – projected with historic men’s and women’s Gucci tailoring. ‘Archivio’ and ‘Cabinet of Wonders’ – perhaps the exhibition’s pinnacles – are designed to capture the feeling of entering the house’s archive, with a series of shelves and vitrines encasing precious Gucci objects. Finally, ‘Carousel’ is a journey through the house’s various creative directors – Ford to Alessandro Michele, Frida Giannini to current creative director Sabato de Sarno – staged as ’a fashion show that neither portrays a collection nor a season, but rather how Gucci has marked the rhythm of the times.’

The exhibition’s last display – also added for the London edition of Gucci Cosmos – is a look towards the future of the house under De Sarno, who showed his first collection as creative director this past September in Milan. Immersed in red, a colour that De Sarno has said will be central to his tenure – inspired by the red walls of The Savoy lift – a central screen shows a visual collage of the Italian designer’s inspirations, from fragments of poetry to flashing images of oceans, candles, explosions, and cities. Like his debut collection, the room is titled ‘Gucci Ancora’, an Italian word which translates to  ‘also now, also then’. Gucci calls the term ‘a heraldic adage that moves time forward.’

’It’s not something you lost,’ explains De Sarno, who attended the exhibition preview. ‘It’s something that you still have, but you want more of it, because it makes you happy.’

Gucci Cosmos runs at 180 Studios, 180 The Strand, London from 11 October to 31 December 2023.

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