Gallici’s Elegy: Navigating the Abyss of Transformation at Ann Demeulemeester SS’24 PFW by Leticia Dare

Model on the catwalk at the Ann Demeulemeester fashion show in Paris, Spring Summer 2024 Ready To Wear Fashion Week, Photo by Valerio Mezzanotti

Dear Shaded Viewers,

In a dimly lit, remotely positioned warehouse, Stefano Gallici mapped out a voyage that seemed less like a conventional runway and more a solemn procession through the caverns of Ann Demeulemeester’s identity during the SS2024 reveal. The brand, swaying between its poetic past and an unforeseeable future, attempted to transcend its own shadow under Gallici’s newfound direction. However, in the midst of conjuring spectral evocations of Demeulemeester’s resonant history, did the collection dilute its own voice amidst the echoes of what once was?

Gallici’s intentionality was clear: to carefully balance homage and innovation. The spectral blue that seeped through a canvas of monochrome was a noticeable bow to the brand’s storied past, yet it seemed to float adrift, searching for an anchor in a sea of contemporary chaos. The structural rebellion of belts, harnesses, and flowing fabrics whispered a desire for liberation, yet appeared shackled by the ghosts they sought to invoke, offering an implicit question: can unbridled innovation truly be achieved in the aftermath of such a distinctive legacy?

As the delicate balance between rigidity and fluidity, opacity and transparency, unravelled across the runway, each garment hinted at an internal struggle between honoring a past epoch and unleashing an authentic new voice. In the enigma of sheer fabrics and cascading belts, there lingered a palpable tension, a paradox, which, instead of presenting a clear path forward, echoed an ongoing symphony of search and exploration.

Perhaps there’s a melancholic beauty in this tension. Gallici orchestrates a quiet rebellion, gently dismantling the traditional formality of structure and replacing it with an anarchic softness that seeks to liberate the wearer from conformity. However, the collection seems to whisper a silent scream into the abyss, grappling with its own transitional identity and courting the precipice of transformation without fully plunging into its depths.

As the chaotic belts entwined with their wearer, they portrayed a material metaphor of the brand’s own journey: bound by its foundational DNA, yet stretching out, reaching towards uncharted territories of self-expression and form. The collection is more than a showcase; it’s an introspective dialogue, a contemplative meditation exploring the realms between tangible reality and abstract idealism.

Gallici’s creative narrative is as elusive as it is concrete, a curious paradox that perhaps reflects our own collective existential meanderings. In a world that is concurrently anchored by digital absolutism and stirred by socio-cultural fluidity, the SS2024 collection is an embodiment of the co-existing duality of reverence and rebellion, past and future, form and formlessness.

In the wake of Demeulemeester, the brand embarks on a journey across a vast ocean, where the echoes of yesteryears are both the wind that propels and the waves that resist. Gallici’s SS2024 becomes a vessel navigating through this metaphysical journey, and only time will unveil whether it will find its own distinctive harbor or remain adrift in the vast sea of existential exploration. This collection is not merely garments on bodies; it is an emotive, unresolved symphony that entwines the spectral with the now, compelling yet mournfully beautiful in its quest for its own essence.

Later,

Leticia