Reasons Why We Love Gucci

The World’s most popular brand has been revealed – but most of us can’t afford it.

Retail may be on its knees, but online one luxury label rules the world. Gucci has been named the globe’s favourite clothing brand.

Of course, I don’t need to tell you that Gucci has been having a bit of a moment of late. Ever since Alessandro Michele took over as Creative Director in 2015, it’s been Gucci fever the world over. His kitsch, idiosyncratic designs resonated with a younger audience (men and women) and Gucci has undergone a dramatic renaissance. In fact, Gucci is the number one label that customers engage with. A staggering 6million plus shoppers browsed online from October to December last year.

The Soho Disco bag is Gucci’s hottest seller – £805

Interestingly, key consumer searches are for a Gucci bag, belt or shoe, and these genre-specific searches are crucial to the brand’s success. Thanks to the iconic and coveted GG logo, customers who can’t afford the clothes are able to buy into the Gucci dream by investing in a statement belt or shoes.

More affluent customers have been snapping up the £805 Soho Disco bags to gowith their £235 and upwards Double G belts,being the second biggest seller.

The Double G belt is the brand’s second biggest seller

The fact that it’s become a celebrity red carpet favourite has obviously helped.

Information regarding Gucci’s success was gleaned by analysing the online shopping behaviour of more than 5 million shoppers, searching, browsing and buying fashion across 12,000 designer and stores online. Gucci now occupies top spot above Balenciaga.

I personally love Gucci because of how completely and utterly crazy it is. But it’s wearable. Its designs frequently defy conventions, break rules and shouldn’t actually really even work.  But they do.

A fantastical collection of intricate floral and fauna prints, clashing colours, embellishment and fur topped off with oversized nerdy glasses. When Alessandro was designing the collection, any sane person would have told him that it was never going to work. But it did, and the Gucci geek was born. And in less than two years Alessandro has created one of the most photographed and talked-about brands in the world.

It reminds us of our childhood. There’s something about the Gucci show that takes us back to our dressing up days, when fashion was all about fantasy. Hearts, bees, bows, brooches, animals, flowers, flounces, ruffles and army jackets – this is the stuff that our formative years were made of.

It unleashed the nerd in all of us. There’s a reason we all fell in love with the Gucci geek, she’s hiding in all of us. The slightly awkward, clumsy aesthetic is familiar, yet cool confirming that it’s O.K to be a bit different. That you don’t have to conform and get it right all the time.

Pretty much everything Alessandro does influences the way we dress. Next season prepare to wear 80s style cocktail dresses, puff ball skirts, giant corsages, spiked denim sequin hoodies and oriental inspired platform shoes.

It combines the old with the new. You could say that he’s found the strength and future of the brand in the company’s past.The reinvention of the Gucci loafer is the best example of this. The fur lined slip on loafer has been spotted on everyone from Alexa Chung, Sienna Miller, Julianne Moore and Irina Shayk to Claudia Winkleman, and I have TWO pairs myself! It’s come back from obscurity and been reinvented to become one of the brand’s best sellers.

Overall, Gucci is the top red-carpet choice for A list celebrities. Alexa Chung, Dakota Fanning and Margot Robbie are just a few of the celebs who have been spotted wearing Gucci on the red carpet in the last few months. This kind of exposure provides worldwide publicity and translates into global sales.

Adios Lie January and hola Fizz Free February. Following ‘Dry January’, we’re all now meant to give up fizzy drinks. Not that I drink many carbonated drinks, but what next? What will we be pressured to do next month?

Why “Lie January”? Because figures show, barely anyone stuck to Dry Jan – let alone Fizz Free Feb.

On the front pages of the newspapers this week, it turns out that Dry January cheats had secret booze sessions at home. In fact, supermarket booze sales last month were up ten percent on the previous January. The spirited truth is that 53% of British households bought booze in January.

A third of all Brits claimed to cut all alcohol in January. But the stats show this was only IN PUBLIC. More than half of households bought alcohol, while Gin sales climbed 23 per cent year on year.

The study also reveals the number of meat free dinners bought in 2018 rocketed by 150 million to 4.4 billion. So, we’re happy to go veggie/vegan but NEVER give up the booze.

Well, if you’re not going vegan or fibbing about being sober, then get yourself down to FIVE GUYS burger joints, where they have just introduced ‘HARDSHAKES’ – their tasty milkshakes, now with added alcohol, to go with your double cheeseburger.

Yes really.

Anything to anaesthetise us from thinking about Brexit, I suppose.

In this week’s issue we check out Rock Chicks and Disco Queens, The Intermittent Fast and Initial Earrings.

Brrrr…. welcome to the depths of winter from the London Zips It Up office.

Cold evenings mean cosying up in bed watching Netflix, and last week we watched the documentary that has captivated the masses

If you haven’t watched the FYRE FESTIVAL doc (on Netflix) yet, you’ve probably already had it spoiled by the deluge of memes, news stories and social media reactions.

The ill-fated festival took place a while ago now, but the involvement of millennial Supermodels, used as social media influencers, has sparked a huge backlash.

The documentary tells the story of Billy McFarland, who planned to throw ‘the most luxurious and greatest music festival of all time with the best acts… which initially turned out to be Migos, Blink 182, Major Lazer.

They booked a luxurious location (an island in the Bahamas which used to belong to Pablo Escobar) and promised a luxury culinary experience.

But in reality, millennial festival goers paid as much as £9,000 for tickets only to stay in rain-soaked disaster relief tents on an unfinished building site (not Pablo’s island). “Five Star Catering” turned out to be the now infamous cheese sandwiches. And there were no on-stage acts, all of whom pulled out before it began.

Billy McFarland has since been convicted of fraud, and sentenced to six years in federal prison, but the investigations into what happened aren’t finished yet.

Supermodel faces – Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin and Emily Ratajkowski– were filmed in bikinis dancing on superyachts in the Bahamas for the promotional video. They could be forced to reveal the ins and outs of how much they were paid by McFarland to promote the festival in 2017.

A whopping $250,000 was reportedly paid to Kendall Jenner in exchange for a post on Instagram about members of G.O.O.D Music – Talent Agency – performing at Fyre Festival, which she did not flag as a paid post.

The upshot is that all social media influencers must hashtag something along the lines of, ‘I was paid for this advertisement’.

What a scandalous mess, but so entertaining. You MUST watch the documentary on Netflix.

Onto this week and you’ll never believe who our high street favourite Zara has collaborated with. Plus, French Connection Brides and the underwear we all need to buy for Valentine’s Day which will hopefully save Marks & Spencer from going under.