GUCCI SS2016 Men Détournement Collection

Détournement

“Détournement is the opposite of quotation” (G. Debord). It’s a kind of game that puts decontextualized fragments back into circulation - objects found by chance and torn away from their history, pre-existing entities that lose their original meaning. It is an act of taking and transposing, destroying and creating anew. It is a positioning in which negation and prelude coexist.

In this sense, détournement can be understood as an aesthetic practice that reconvenes dispersed fragments within a whole new meaning. Through a playful ability to intercept what exists and to reassemble it in an unprecedented frame of reference, each fragment acquires a vital new impulse.

 The result is a symphony of retrieved evidence where ancient meanings and emerging qualities cohabit - an eclectic polyphony in which living signs and worlds acquire new meanings and values.

The Men’s SS2016 Collection moves precisely in this direction. Each ensemble is constructed through combinations and juxtapositions of memories projected against a new poetic horizon. Poetic in its germination of entirely fresh meanings. Shapes, embellishments, details and techniques come together in a novel pattern, giving rise to shifts in perception.

From this point of view, the recovery of fragments from an “elsewhere” in space and time is not their return in identical form; it’s not a re-proposition of the past as an inert fact. Rather, it’s the renewal of possibility for what was. It’s the reinvention of stored-up occasions.

Memory is in fact a powerful instrument, capable of restoring to the past its sense of possibility (G. Agamben) and a new raison d’être. Within this frame, the playful practice of situational détournement yields a displacement of the gaze. Through the re-appropriation of discursive and decontextualized fragments, it establishes a new language, a new idea of beauty. But the compositional principle that substantiates it is not only aesthetic.

Détournement is also, and above all, a political device. Its strength lies in the possibility of transgressing what already exists and offering glimpses of new possibilities of freedom and emancipation.

It is a path that, in finding “the right sense of anachrony” (J. Derrida), is capable of establishing a new connection between the store of remembrances and that of dreams - and of reassociating, in new forms, the reservoirs of memory with the glimmers of imagination that urge us into the future.