The line between fashion and art has often been blurred, but probably never as blatantly as Gucci’s new Instagram initiative, #GucciGram. Now users of the app will find Gucci-filled artworks amongst the Kim Kardashian selfies and shoe still-lives that usually fill up your feed.
On October 29, Gucci creative-director, Alessandro Michele, invited artists to use and re-work popular Gucci prints, floral #GGBlooms or #GGCaleido, into their artwork and share them with the world on social media. The result? A diverse mix of everything from 19th Century women with a Gucci handbag, to fun gifs and illustrations.
As well as sharing on their on social-media, Gucci will also be displaying the full collection of entries on the Gucci website featuring work of an array of artists from the Internationally famous to emerging new talent. “#GucciGram is a starting point to tell different stories, which are unlimited by a great freedom,” said Michele, a designer who we so often see is inspired by an eclectic-mix of the old and the new. “Today creativity is often born and finds its voice in digital media, a vital source of visual culture.”
See some of our favourites so far…
“#GucciGram is a starting point to tell different stories, which are all united by great freedom. Today creativity is often born and finds its voice in digital media, a vital source of visual culture.” Alessandro Michele With its #GGBlooms and #GGCaleido prints, which layer a dazzling floral bouquet as well as an ever-shifting geometric pattern inspired by the eponymous kaleidoscope over classic double-G print fabric, Gucci underlines our new cultural reality. Namely, we’re all on the Internet, all the time. The way we consume visual art has changed. We don’t need to wait to go to a museum anymore. We just open Instagram on our smartphones and have immediate, intimate access to brilliant photographers and artists around the world who post their work as soon as they create it. Inspiration is drawn as easily from 19th-century Florence as it is from 21st-century technology. Everything is a remix. #GucciGram takes place in this cultural collision. The artists #AlessandroMichele has chosen all take different approaches to Instagram, but what they have in common is their ability to use the Internet to disseminate new forms of imagery. At the forefront of cultural innovation, these artists have chosen to create work on their own terms and present it directly to their audiences in a subversion of the old indirect relationship of artists, curators, and viewers. Gucci on Instagram shows us that we can seek out our own creative voices online and approach culture voraciously. Text by @kchayka
A photo posted by Gucci (@gucci) on Oct 28, 2015 at 7:00am PDT
The Most Famous Artist (@themostfamousartist) is actually a group of several, who pool their brilliance to work together on odd jobs of appropriation, upcycling, and zeitgeist-creation. The work they sell directly under The Most Famous Artist name repurposes found or foraged paintings, taking the work of another, often forgettable nobody artist and overpainting it. The originals are often genre paintings, or works trapped in 19th century ideas of composition and color. The Most Famous Artist updates these period pieces with corporate as well as couture logos, or abstract, much more contemporary swathes of color, which frequently spill beyond the canvas and onto the frame. This treatment of painting itself as a kind of readymade that can be augmented with a signature style is very much in line with the collective’s business-forward, high-visibility, high-volume sensibility. On Instagram, The Most Famous Artist’s feed is a hodgepodge of its many members’ wide-ranging interests. The feed pulls in the work of other unquestionably famous artists, creating a kind of extended riff on artistic celebrity itself. It is also an interrogation of what makes famous art famous. But where their paintings often trade in the language of logos, their Instagrams cite contemporary art styles like Damien Hirst’s dots, or Banksy tags, halftone blips like partial views of a Roy Lichtenstein or a Barbara Kruger. For #GucciGram, The Most Famous Artist member Matty Mo took the iconic Grant Wood painting, “American Gothic,” and reworked the simple colonial-print fabric the woman wears so it looks like her top was made from a bolt of #GGBlooms fabric. The man is wrapped in a blown-up version of #GGCaleido, enlarging the geometric pattern so it seems like scrim pulled over his drab coat. Their doctored, dressed-up image is then shown from several different vantages and places, a gleeful confusion of era that puts now in touch with then. Text by @epsteinian
A photo posted by Gucci (@gucci) on Oct 28, 2015 at 9:26am PDT
The New York-based artist Kalen Hollomon’s (@kalen_hollomon) work is a mix of classic paper collage and digital knowhow, splicing images from fashion and old-school advertising, often bringing them to life through animation. The paper cut-outs can be cheekily demure, trashy-sexy, or even creepy—like Hollomon’s video of a photo of Justin Bieber with eyes moving behind paper cutouts. Updating the old-fashioned technique of paper collage with new audio/video tricks brings ripe fruit to Hollomon’s art practice, which benefits from the visual language of celebrity and advertising. There’s Britney Spears licking a kitten, an image which seems like it should have existed already; there’s Michael Jordan with a cup of Gatorade and a startlingly loose wrist, his hand rotating as though on an axle. The animation is charmingly flat, paper-based, geometric slides or turns or rotations, making it feel tactile and even a little silly—it’s a joke, but happily, we’re all in on it. For #GucciGram, Hollomon has utilized collage, taking found imagery of all plump 80s babes with red lips, hair gel and lustful demeanors in combination with photos of the new #GGBlooms bag, for a collection of images inspired by desire. They speak to a tongue-in-cheek consumer culture, luxury that knows what luxury is and what luxury tastes like—literally. Text by @lrsphm
A photo posted by Gucci (@gucci) on Oct 28, 2015 at 9:51am PDT
Everyone knows that Instagram is a caricature of real life, but Ed Fornieles (@eddfornieles) is illustrating that quite bluntly—by becoming a cartoon. In his current project, the artist has transformed himself and his friends into cartoon avatars that navigate photographs of real landscapes, creating an effect familiar to millennials who grew up watching “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “Space Jam.” Fornieles has been using social media as a platform for his work ever since 2011’s “Dorm Daze,” a semi-scripted narrative that unfolded on Facebook over three months, with actors “performing” profiles based on American college students. When the British artist moved to Los Angeles, this line between reality and fiction was further blurred. On Instagram, Fornieles is now an anthropomorphized fox, having adventures in real-life places with pals like critic Dean Kissick (a platypus) and the artist Amalia Ulman (a cat). In his remix for #GucciGram, there’s a new lady-rabbit visiting LA landmarks like the Griffith Observatory in a sultry #GGBlooms -inspired dress. See more through link in bio. Text by @paloma_powers
A photo posted by Gucci (@gucci) on Oct 29, 2015 at 4:40am PDT
To press play on one of U.S. artist Nic Courdy’s (@ncour) video collages is to enter into a spellbinding convergence of fine art, film and music. Often romantic, sometimes verging on grotesque, the thematic scenes @ncour creates would overwhelm the senses if not for the elegant touch of this young American artist, who knows just how much stimuli his followers can take in one Instagram-sized shot. Starting with paintings from the Old Masters, or those of early 20th Century Modernists, Courdy animates his collages with video clips depicting nature and classic film. Then, dubbed with movie voiceovers and swelling film scores, or animated against a backdrop of classical music arrangements, each finished collage tells a story as evocative as any painting, film or piece of music is able to. For his collaboration with #GucciGram, Courdy has created a cinematic dreamscape of fine art, film, dance, music and fashion. In it, collaged-in characters lounge in a wooded sanctuary, while a window to another time and space reveals two classic film lovers making their way toward a kiss punctuated by a single pink flower: a blossom seemingly plucked from the #GGBlooms print blanketing the forest floor. Text by @allisonkgibson
A video posted by Gucci (@gucci) on Oct 29, 2015 at 8:29am PDT
The UK-based Gill Button’s illustrations are done in a playful, painterly hand that makes the visages, coifs, and poses of high fashion both intimate and accessible. Like the stray wisp of hair framing the face of the immaculate model or the untucked edge of a t-shirt holding a look together, the confident, fluid brushwork of @buttonfruit’s illustrations make beauty and glamour ever more beautiful and glamorous by rendering the imperfect details—slight asymmetry; the palette of colors that make up the purplish blue shadows under an eye. Forget Photoshop or airbrushing: the magic is in seeing every stroke, every painterly decision. The illustrations are sleek, fluid, and effortless—the artistic equivalent of that hip, disaffected friend you adore and secretly wouldn’t mind emulating. Tightly cropped on Instagram, the compositions pull the viewer up close and personal: @buttonfruit’s fashion portraits are at once confrontational and cool, intimate and vulnerable. In her riff for #GucciGram on the #GGCaleido and #GGBlooms prints, @buttonfruit gives the model a sharp, intelligent gaze; she’s a woman who knows how to get what she wants, and she’s dressed to do it. The artist’s characteristically fluid brushwork and eye for color render patterns in confident, crisp detail; it’s dazzlingly clear and refreshing to look upon. See more through link in bio. Text by @lrsphm
A photo posted by Gucci (@gucci) on Oct 29, 2015 at 10:24am PDT
This article originally appeared on Elleuk.com
