STYLE Edit: Gucci’s Epilogue collection celebrates Ken Scott – why creative director Alessandro Michele adores the late designer’s iconic 60s and 70s floral fabrics

Apr 10 , 2021

Gucci’s Epilogue collection features the bold 60s and 70s floral designs of Ken Scott. Photo: Gucci

The legendary designer’s florid florals were worn by the style-setting women of the day: Twiggy, Brigitte Bardot, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Audrey Hepburn

Michele accessed Scott’s archives and had patterns applied to his new women and menswear collections of T-shirts, blazers, flowing dresses and accessories

As the world learned to slow down and stay in amid a global pandemic, the idea of “stopping and smelling the roses” gained a little more currency than usual. Our coronavirus-induced distance from nature and each other is perhaps why the “you only live once” maximalist fashion of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci is appealing to more luxury consumers: if not now, when can I wear clashing prints, costume jewellery, a floral print headband and feather boa?

The botanical exuberance of designer Ken Scott’s prints, featured in Gucci’s latest Epilogue collection, only add to Michele’s free-spirited, limitlessly creative philosophy.

From the Gucci Epilogue collection, a collaboration with designer Ken Scott. Photo: Gucci

As the creative director says about Epilogue: “The period of greatest liberation, which I lived through when I was a child, was the 70s, which were really the golden years of the brand I work for, and I keep going back to them because, for me personally, they were the real seeds of change.”

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The collection was launched in February, and Michele conceived a dedicated campaign for the selection of special pieces incorporating the work of Ken Scott. Photographed by Mark Peckmezian, the patterns from Scott’s design archives – featured on the Gucci pieces – are also applied to wallpaper, curtains, tablecloths and cushions, transforming the space into an overwhelming and stimulating environment. This is a world where you can stop and – if not smell – at least admire the roses, peonies, poppies and sunflowers from Scott’s kaleidoscopic botanical wonderland, a lockdown oasis we never knew we wanted.

If you’re unfamiliar with the American fashion designer, it might be because Scott was creating prints and patterns before your time – in the 60s and 70s. But you’ll recognise some of the models that wore his fabrics: Twiggy, Brigitte Bardot, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Audrey Hepburn.

In one less-cited photo of the Breakfast at Tiffany’s star from 1967, Hepburn wears a dress with Ken Scott’s abstract floral print, photographed by William Klein. According to Shahidha Bari, professor of fashion cultures and histories at the London College of Fashion, who narrates a story about the American designer’s life and career on Gucci Podcast, Hepburn called it her “bird dress” and she “loved wearing it”.