Gucci Gets to the Core of the Big Apple with the Legendary Peter Funch
Written By: Rhea Lobo
Photographer Peter Funch captured New Yorkers of every style in Gucci’s new GucciCore campaign, a portrait of the city’s plurality.
Courtesy of Gucci
Courtesy of Gucci
Last May, Demna hijacked Times Square with GucciCore. Billboards flashed fake Gucci ads for Gucci Gym and Gucci Pets (we’d have spent a pretty penny at both); Cindy Crawford, Paris Hilton, and Tom Brady strutted the asphalt with Mariah Carey and Kim K. looking on. Five months later, the sequel has reached our feeds and it’s all about the core of the matter: The New Yorkers.
Enter photographer Peter Funch, who once spent nine years on the corner of 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, photographing commuters pouring out of Grand Central every weekday morning. Writer Douglas Coupland called the project “a kinder, gentler kind of surveillance,” and we couldn’t agree more. In his Babel Tales series, Funch spotted patterns hiding in the crowd: yawners, balloon carriers, people dressed head to toe in red. He’s the optimal eye for GucciCore, a core wardrobe of peacoats, trenches, business suits, essential shirts, and pencil skirts, because nothing proves a staple like spotting it on the street time and time again.
Courtesy of Gucci
And what a wardrobe to hand a New York photographer. These are the pieces that built the city’s screen (and off-screen) identity. The power suits of Working Girl, the pencil skirts of Sex and the City, the sharp coats of The Devil Wears Prada, but also unmistakably Gucci. And Demna’s season long study of New Yorkers was not in vain. Those same characters that the creative director studied, Peter Funch did too. And this time, in this version of GucciCore, we see Lebanese jewelry designer Sabine Getty join the crowd.
Courtesy of Gucci
The dots connect nicely. The runway was a square full of invented Gucci products, a fantasy in some sense of the word, so the campaign makes a human counterpoint. Instead of a single muse, Funch frames groups of New Yorkers, each wearing the same foundations their own way. It echoes Demna’s show notes, in which he described “a plurality of styles that intersect like the streets of the city.” Even the setting is a homecoming since Gucci opened its first store outside Italy in New York circa 1953.
It’s a poignant pivot for a Maison that’s made noise in Milan and Manhattan, and now wants you to see how clothes present on non-hijacked streets of the city, and we can’t wait to see which corner Gucci will claim next.
Courtesy of Gucci
Courtesy of Gucci
END OF STORY
