“It was one of the best Zooms I’ve been on all year!” says Bianca Saunders, remembering Alessandro Michele’s briefing to 15 young designers on making their films for GucciFest. “It was really a thrill to be selected for a project like this.” Michele pretty much encouraged everyone to go crazy with their ideas—the only parameters being that the films shouldn’t be
more than 10 minutes, and that they should mix in a couple of new things. Sauders thought about it and decided, she says, that “it would be better to challenge myself to do a whole new thing—to show a massive fashion house what a small brand can do. I was in quarantine for two weeks, having just come back from Paris. It was a really quick turnaround, but I managed to use that time to design it, order fabrics, and plan the film. I think I even impressed myself a little bit in how just how much I can achieve in a short space of time.”
What she came up with is “The Pedestrian,” a cutely revealing film about men made with her friend Akinola Davies Jr., inspired by a sequence in Spike Lee’s
She’s Gotta Have It, “where a bunch of men are talking about a female character and describing how they’re going to approach her. A lot of my work is about subverting that sort of thing, and turning it the other way around. So it’s the woman asking the questions.” Her models are asked to describe themselves, their idea of an ideal date, and their pick-up lines. “There’s an element of wit in it, to make people smile and see a bit more fun within fashion.”
A couple of her subjects’ ideal dates include “watching an anime film” and “going for a nice meal and then to laser tag.” One boy’s pickup line goes “Are you an astronaut? Because you’re out of this world.” Two of them go for “are
you from Tennessee? Because you’re the only ten I see,” though the youngest one confesses, “but now I’m older, I know that’s absolutely terrible.”
Saunders is always on the side of the men she knows. Delicately and affectionately getting them to reveal their usually unspoken feelings has been the framework of her research since her menswear graduation project at the Royal College of Art, when she had the brilliantly insightful idea of interviewing some male friends in
their bedrooms to find out what really makes them choose the clothes they wear.
The upshot of her unexpected Gucci commission is that Saunders was able to develop a 12-look continuation of her last collection. She circled back to refine her distinctive boxy tailored shirts, the inset pleated shoulder lines, minimal trench coat shapes, and forward-angled trouser cuts. “So it’s my first pre-fall collection! Part two of what I did for spring.” As for all of the GucciFest
young designers, it enabled her to gain more experience in today’s essentially important domain of fashion film-making, to have it springboarded onto an internationally-viewed platform, and to get ready with something more to sell in the bargain. “I would never have been able to afford to do all that without this opportunity,” she smiles. “I’m really grateful to them.”