24-04-2025
Gucci's ‘The Art of Silk' unfurls a tapestry of craft and culture in Florence
In a fifteenth-century palazzo nestled in Florence's Oltrarno district, Gucci is tracing the fine threads of its legacy—one scarf at a time. The Art of Silk, the Italian House's new exhibition and accompanying publication, offers a rare look inside the atelier's storied relationship with silk, positioning the accessory not just as a flourish of fashion, but as a cultural artefact.
It all began with Tolda di Nave, a nautical-themed silk scarf created in 1958 through a collaboration with a Como-based silk producer. What followed was a visual and material archive that grew increasingly intricate—most notably with the arrival of illustrator Vittorio Accornero de Testa, whose baroque, botanical imaginings defined the House's scarf designs for decades.
Among them, the most enduring remains the Flora scarf, created in 1966 for Princess Grace of Monaco. With its 43 species of flora and fauna rendered in 37 hand-applied colours, the design has become a quiet symbol of Gucci's dedication to detail and Italian artistry. Today, it adorns the slipcase of the exhibition's companion book—an homage to a motif that has spanned from the necks of royals to the runways of Alessandro Michele.
The Art of Silk is not just a retrospective—it is also an act of renewal. A highlight of the exhibition is 90×90, a project featuring nine limited-edition scarves reinterpreted by contemporary artists. The works offer a fresh lens on Gucci's design language, blurring the lines between wearable object and visual art.
While the fashion world continues to spin toward the digital and ephemeral, Gucci's silk showcase is a reminder of what remains rooted: craftsmanship, history, and the art of making something slowly. In its best moments, The Art of Silk reads like a love letter to the analogue.
