Fashion

Gucci Pre-Fall 2021

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In episode three of Ouverture of Something That Never Ended, the miniseries that Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele codirected to promote the spring 2021 Gucci collection, the pop star and cultural avatar Harry Styles makes a cameo wearing a pink Gucci tee tucked into eco denim washed shorts. “When it comes to making art it’s about finding the thing you’ve always wanted to see that has never been made,” Styles speaks into a phone. “It’s always an uncomfortable moment, I think, when you find the thing. You don’t know if you love it or hate it because you don’t really know what it is yet. But I think that’s the most exciting place to work in.”

The words could’ve come out of his friend Alessandro Michele’s mouth this season. Faced with the impossibility of a runway show amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gucci creative director organized a collaboration with Van Sant, a filmmaker whose circuitous, oblique storytelling he’s long admired. “I could see through his eyes,” Michele said at a joint press conference earlier this month. In a season of experimentation both analog and digital, Gucci’s project—90 edited minutes shot in Rome over a period of 20 days—ranks among the most ambitious and the most esoteric.

The miniseries streamed on a dedicated site dubbed GucciFest, where the brand also supported videos made by 15 emerging designers from around the world. Both Ouverture and the platform the company created to showcase it, signify the shifting role of fashion brands mid-pandemic (and in the hypothetical post-consumer future, too). Gucci and its fashion company peers are no longer just product makers, they’re also content providers. Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour, one of the designers Michele selected for GucciFest, crystalised the change that’s now in motion: “We’re still artists and people are still looking at what we’re going to do next,” Taymour told my Vogue Runway colleague Brooke Bobb. “But… there’s a way to create a more educational model or expressive model, rather than a product model.”

Though it’s considerably less elaborately plotted than that other fashionable miniseries that aired this week, The Crown, Ouverture’s impressionistic episodes are nonetheless highly watchable: Florence Welch gliding through a vintage store slipping handwritten notes into the pockets of jeans or the purse of a passerby… Billie Eilish frolicking with her pet robot dogs in what looks like the exurbs of LA… the miniseries’ star Silvia Calderoni’s tour through Rome’s empty ancient streets by scooter at night… Each of those vignettes charmed and in every scene the characters were wearing head-to-toe Gucci.

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Entertainment

A$AP Rocky Turned An Entire Manchester City Kit Into His Album Rollout

Photo: DannyB Photos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A$AP Rocky doesn’t do album rollouts quietly, and this one recruited an entire Premier League club to help. Manchester City, PUMA, and Rocky teamed up on a limited apparel run tied to “Don’t Be Dumb,” his 2026 album, timed around his September 5th show at Co-op Live.

The centerpiece is a long-sleeve PUMA King jersey in black and archive gold, with “DON’T BE DUMB” running down the sleeve and AWGE branding worked in throughout. A bold “MANCHESTER” graphic covers the back. Fans could also add limited “A$AP 11” name-and-number printing onto the club’s actual Home, Away, or Third kits, while supplies lasted at retail.

There’s a players-only version too, and it never went up for sale. That one sticks closer to City’s usual sky-blue identity, with its own sleeve detailing and back graphic — the kind of piece that exists purely because a handful of people got lucky.

The whole rollout kicked off with a one-night pop-up on September 4th, when PUMA turned a spot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter into a pop-up cafe for the night, mixing football, music, and street style into one room before the wider release hit the stadium store the next morning. Some of those jerseys even came with golden tickets to the concert or that Saturday’s match.

Rocky has called the project true to his own design language, and it’s not even his only club collaboration this cycle — a similar drop with AC Milan landed around the same time. At this point, the line between fashion week and matchday has basically disappeared.

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Entertainment

Quavo And Lids Are Going All In On Atlanta With Their New Cap Pack

Photo: Finish Line / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Quavo has never been shy about his hat obsession, and Lids just gave him another outlet for it. Their new “Atlanta” pack drops September 12th, marking another round in a partnership that’s been running strong since 2019.

The collection is a love letter to the city, spread across three very different caps. One mashes up pinstripes, script lettering, and Braves branding into a single design, working navy, red, white, and light blue into the mix. Another goes the opposite direction entirely — fully iced out in crystal detailing, done up in black and red, with both the Falcons and the Braves showing up in the design. The third strips things back to an old-school “ATL” trucker cap in red, white, and gold, the kind of understated piece that lets the city’s name do the talking.

None of this is new territory for Quavo. He’s talked before about waiting on hat releases as a kid, and that same excitement seems to be what’s kept this partnership going years past most celebrity collabs. His earlier Lids run leaned on one moment — the Braves’ 1995 World Series win — but this pack pulls from the city’s whole sports history instead of just one highlight.

Lids has called Quavo one of the rare voices who can blend music, fashion, and sports without it feeling forced, and this drop backs that up. Given how fast his past releases have moved, Atlanta might want to set an alarm for September 12th.

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