Real retail fantasy
Gucci has fun blurring the lines between fashion, food, history and art with Gucci Garden. Housed in the tony 14th-century Palazzo della Mercanzia in the very heart of Florence, Gucci Garden explores the Italian brand’s past and future, and rocks a trattoria with a menu by three-Michelin-star chef Massimo Bottura and chef Karime Lopez.
The ground floor boutique is a technicolor garden of Gucci delights with exclusive, Gucci Garden only delicious pieces. In the next room is a boutique-bookstore with art books, rare books, fab magazines and periodicals, as well as objets d’art and correspondence.
Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele describes Gucci Garden as a project that is less about creating a retail environment and more about dreaming up a fantasy world— with the Gucci brand at its center. “The Garden is real,” he says, “but it belongs above all to the mind.”
The first floor is where Michele’s project comes to life- a series of rooms /gallery spaces that a veritable wunderkammers to Michele’s obsessions and idiosyncrasies with a Gucci flair. In my opinion, it’s a freedom of fashion- a blank page that Michele fills whenever he wants, with what ever he wants, and I love it.
A version of this article originally appeared in American Way Magazine, April 2018.
