Gucci 'An Ode to Love' Campaign with Wen Qi and Daniel Zhou Shot by Leslie Zhang AOC Fashion

There’s an A-team on this new summer 2023 campaign including art directors Kevin Tekinel and Charles Levai, director Tin Seoi and photographer Leslie Zhang [IG], whose photography we love. Taiwanese actor Wen Qi and Chinese singer Daniel Zhou star are the lovebirds.

AOC disagrees with more than one fashion writer who has seen this new Gucci ‘An Ode to Love’ campaign and responded with words of praise that storytelling is back at Gucci. Whew!

In today’s world it’s totally understandable that brands must evolve and are often required to shake off the dust in a major way, to attract a new, younger client-base. Typically, though, luxury brands don’t run back to what they tried to escape eight years ago.

Following the departure of Alessandro Michele, the most recent advertising campaigns and initiatives [some future campaigns were done when he left] have lacked deep emotional storytelling — which was Gucci’s strength under Marco Bizzarri and Alessandro Michele.

This new campaign is pure and innocent — which is not how Alessandro Michele served it up. He served up lighthearted frolic and fun, but always with an undercurrent of irony, social commentary, activism with a twist, or unadulterated camp.

Alessandro Michele took you into the setting to experience the imagery yourself, not as an observer.

In my case, he sometimes admonished me [metaphorically], because I wasn’t in the mood to be part of the joke. Yet I chuckled when he grabbed me by the arm, saying “Would you take a damn break, Anne, and let your imagination run wild. Come and play with us.”

If one is being glossy superficial in our analysis and not looking under the hood, it’s easy to see the appeal of this new Gucci campaign. And I know that job #1 is to stop the revenue slide in China.

But this is a commercial; it’s a bunch of ads. And Gucci has not been making ads since Marco Bizzari and Alessandro Michele revved up the Gucci brand, which hadn’t recovered from Tom Ford’s departure.

I’m a Tom Ford woman, but I came to adore Alessandro Michele and his positivity impact on humans — including me.

Kering should proceed cautiously in assuming what China, in particular, began to reject about Gucci in 2022. ‘Toning it Down for China’ marketing needn’t mean looking like a superficial Hallmark card. ~ Anne