The Kering-owned luxury fashion house Gucci has a new offering for Chinese consumers. From March 11-17, residents of Chengdu, Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai will be able to experience the Ancora collection in the flesh. During Gucci’s takeover of Chinese malls, the man behind the project, Sabato de Sarno, is also making an appearance in Shanghai.
The four imposing pop-up spaces are designed to emulate the atmosphere of the collection’s debut at Milan Fashion Week last September. Ancora is de Sarno’s first collection as CD at Gucci, but the designs also represent a huge moment for the brand as a whole. The Guardian called Ancora a “factory reset”, as it departs drastically from the previous creative director’s “exuberant camp”. Instead, de Sarno has opted for a more quiet luxury aesthetic.
“Ancora means a lot of things,” Sabato De Sarno explained in an interview with WWD. “It means ‘again’ in Italian, but it’s also more personal; it’s not something you lost, it’s something that you still have, but you want more of it because it makes you happy… I want people to fall in love with Gucci again.”
It looks like Chinese netizens are ready to do just that. #GucciAncora has already amassed an astounding 1.1 billion views on China’s Twitter-microblogging platform, Weibo, an impressive figure even for a global name like Gucci. Chinese and Taiwanese celebrities came out in droves to support the opening and generate some media hype, each getting their moment to pose in the dramatic interior of the Ancora pop-up spaces.
Next up, de Santo is set to unveil the next phase of the project, Design Ancora, at Milan Design Week in April. Gucci has teased it as a showcase of five objects “from a bygone era that are symbols of Italianity, and even more so of Milananness, with the intention of representing contemporaneity through the interpretation of their iconicity.”
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