Gucci Is Launching a Decor Line—And It’s As Fantastic As You’d Think

Praise be to the fashion and home decor gods—Gucci is launching a home line. Earlier today, the Italian fashion house, which is currently under the creative leadership of Alessandro Michele, announced the news. “Gucci is pleased to announce the launch of Gucci Décor, an eclectic collection of items with which customers can dress their own spaces,” the press release read. “The idea is not to prescribe a particular decorative look, but to provide elements that allow for living spaces to be customized.” The Italian fashion house also shared the news on their Instagram account, where they posted a series of illustrations by artist Alex Merry depicting the line.

Gucci Décor will be available to purchase online and at some Gucci and specialty stores starting in September. The collection will include cushions, candles, incense trays, chairs, screens, wallpaper, metal trays, and metal folding tables. The folding tables, “epitomize Michele’s imaginative notion that if you make pieces easily moveable, you can constantly dress and re-dress your environment,” Gucci said.

Fragrant candles and beautiful incense trays represent the lowest end of the price spectrum, costing approximately $190. The silk screens however, which include a myriad of tessellated designs, including one blue and pink octopi print, are almost $30,000—making them the most expensive pieces included in the line. Interestingly, Gucci Décor will be displayed fluidly throughout the brand’s brick-and-mortar locations, rather than being relegated to designated areas.

Subsequent Instagram posts from the house provided more detail on some of the items that will be available, including a Ligurian Chiavari chair featuring an upholstered cushion. “Created by #AlessandroMichele, the velvet upholstery is embroidered with a cat head, and clusters of flowers,” the caption of one illustration read. “The intricate motifs are embroidered and then hand-applied, a process that takes approximately 10 hours to complete.”

One of the many looks from Gucci’s latest collection that featured a snake. Snakes appear on two Gucci Décor pillows.

Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigital.tv

For anyone even semi-familiar with Michele’s shows for Gucci, this cat pillow may ring a distant bell. At many of Michele’s runway presentations, guests have arrived to find similarly well-appointed cushions on their seats. Needless to say, they quickly became Instagram catnip. (Pun intended.) But these instances were far from the first indication of Michele's interest in the home. The Italian polymath, who is known to be something of a maximalist Renaissance man, was first profiled in Vogue in a feature that paid a equal attention to his carefully curated home. What’s more, Michele is the creative director of Richard Ginori, a cultishly beloved porcelain manufacturer that’s well worth it’s salt in design acumen.

Some of the items that will be part of Gucci Décor are in fact from Richard Ginori. (Richard Ginori, like Gucci, is a Florentine company, and Gucci now owns the heritage brand.) The items in question are, unsurprisingly, the tableware, candles, and incense trays due out this fall. The candles and incense will be available in a variety of scents, titled Inventum, Fumus, Herbosum, and Esotericum.

Many of these products clearly depict some of Gucci’s famous motifs. There are the silk, vinyl, and paper wallpapers, which include a floral pattern from the Fall ’15 collection. But there’s also the menagerie of animals, now a familiar cast of characters, which frequently crop up in Gucci’s clothing, handbags, and other accessories.

Gucci isn’t the first major fashion house to dip its toes into the interior design waters. Far from it—just think of the likes of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, two major brands that created huge, and lucrative, home branches. And creatively, the chance to expand one’s design vision to a multitude of platforms is clearly enticing to many of the heavy-hitter designers working today. Just consider Raf Simon’s jump from Dior to Calvin Klein, for example, and the various tiers of the brand that he now gets to control. So is Alessandro Michele looking expand Gucci across a multitude of fronts? It’s too early to say, and certainly Michele has significant aesthetic and stylistic differences from these American counterparts. But for a designer with such complete autonomy when it comes to the company’s store concepts, it’s difficult to imagine that Michele isn’t at least a little bit interested in seeing a visually cohesive, and horizontally integrated, Gucci expanding it’s aesthetic territory. In 2017 after all, it’s Alessandro’s world.

Above, a look at the complete Gucci Décor collection. Below, a look at artist Alex Merry’s correlating, and specially commissioned, illustrations.