Sorry, Is This Advertisement for Gucci, or Just the Pleasures of Antique Malls? 

Gucci is rolling out its campaign for Spring/Summer 2019; it’s a deliberate homage to the golden age of Hollywood including a video full of images lifted whole from movies like Singing in the Rain. It doesn’t particularly make me want to buy Gucci, though. It just makes me want to watch An American in Paris in the middle of the night during summer vacation.

Sure, we get it: Gucci’s thing is extreme upscaling of the mid-1970s, and this hews to that same line, as it quite beautifully invokes consuming classic Hollywood cinema in the era of the juicy tell-all memoirs that emerged from the ashes of the studio system. (They did this same thing with, basically, the original Star Trek and other science fiction television shows of the era.) I am absolutely not immune to the appeal of this!

But nothing about it makes me want Gucci. It doesn’t even incline me to walk by a Gucci store and look at their window displays. It works much, much better as an advertisement for spending an entire afternoon at an enormous antique mall, combing through crumbling copies of movie fan magazines. Or—if one is feeling ambitious!—perhaps seeing whether there are some Ernst Lubitsch movies playing at the nearest now that Filmstruck is dead. Buying high-end fashion, though? Nah.