Gucci sends 68 pairs of twins down runway at Milan Fashion Week

Creative director Alessandro Michele was inspired by his mother and aunt, who are twins

Gucci left the fashion set seeing double at its Milan Fashion Week show on Friday (23 September) as 68 pairs of identically-dressed twins took to the runway.

Creative director Alessandro Michele created the “Gucci Twinsburg” show thanks to inspiration from his mother, who is a twin.

In his show notes, he included a dedication to his mother Eralda and her twin sister Giuliana, who he described as “two extraordinary women who made their twinship the ultimate seal of their existence”.

“To my twin mums, that were able to comprehend life only through the presence of the other,” Michele wrote.

The name of the show was also a nod to a town in Ohio that holds a yearly festival for twins, which is the world’s largest annual gathering of twins.

According to The Guardian, Gucci sent model scouts in secret to the twins festival to find the pairs who would eventually walk for them in Milan.

Single models were seen walking down the catwalk at the start of the show, before a wall was lifted to reveal their twin siblings on the other side wearing the same outfits.

The finale saw each set of twins walking down the runway together hand-in-hand.

Stand-out looks from the catwalk included purple embellished skirts that clashed with yellow and black knee-high boots, fringed sunglasses and Gremlin toys attached to handbags, checkered cardigans paired with baggy leather trousers and facial jewellery atop business-like blazers and trousers.

Gucci’s runway brought a number of celebrities to watch the spectacle, including Daisy Edgar-Jones, Julia Garner, Jodie Turner-Smith, Amandla Stenberg, and Law Roach.

Michele’s vision to send identical twins in identical clothes stemmed from the idea that fashion looks different according to each individual, even if two individuals look the same.

He told Harper’s Bazaar: “The same clothes emanate different qualities on seemingly identical bodies. Fashion, after all, lives on serial multiplications that don’t hamper the most genuine expression of every possible individuality.”

In his show notes, Michele added: “It’s exactly the impossibility of the perfectly identical that nourishes the magic of twins.

“Twinsburg plays this game, producing a tension in the relationship between original and copy. As if by magic, clothes duplicate. They seem to lose their status of singularity.

“The effect is alienating and ambiguous. Almost a rift in the idea of identity, and then, the revelation; the same clothes emanate different qualities on seemingly identical bodies.”