Gucci presents its Primavera campaign. The film was directed by Johan Renck, and in it, Kate Moss lip-syncs to Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. A room full of strangers gradually pairs off on the dance floor as the video unfolds. The star-studded cast also includes Jin from BTS, NINGNING from aespa, Xiao Zhan, Tom Brady, Shawn Mendes, Alex Consani, Rico Nasty, EsDeeKid, Lee Young Ae, and Tarzzan. They were photographed by Michal Chelbin.
Demna at Gucci: a new vision
The campaign arrives at a moment when the House is undergoing its biggest change in years. Georgian designer Demna surprisingly took over as creative director of Gucci. Before that, he was the longtime visionary behind Balenciaga and co-founder of Vetements.
His debut collection, La Famiglia, leaned into theatricality, irony, and Hollywood retro glamour. He presented it in an unconventional way, through a 30-minute film called The Tiger rather than a traditional runway show. Demi Moore played the fictional head of the Gucci corporation in it.
Demna also chose to dig directly into the House’s archive. He revived provocative pieces from the 1990s, including the infamous G-string bikini with the diamond logo, originally designed by Tom Ford. In that same spirit, he staged the GucciCore show on Times Square, where New York’s street runway featured icons like Paris Hilton and Cindy Crawford.
This very obsession with the 1990s is what makes the Primavera campaign feel logical. Wicked Game, after all, belongs to that exact decade, one that Demna references elsewhere in his vision for Gucci.
Wicked Game: a song that once defined an era
Chris Isaak wrote Wicked Game in 1989, but it didn’t become a real hit until a year later, when David Lynch used it in Wild at Heart. The song’s most famous music video was shot in 1991 by photographer and director Herb Ritts, starring Danish model Helena Christensen, in black and white, on Hawaii’s Kamoamoa Beach, which was completely buried by lava from the Kilauea volcano shortly after filming. The video won MTV VMAs for Best Male Video and Best Cinematography, and remains one of the most sensual music videos ever made.
Kate Moss and Herb Ritts: the circle closes
The choice of Kate Moss as the face of a campaign referencing this exact video is no coincidence. Thirty years earlier, in 1994, Kate Moss herself posed for Herb Ritts, alongside Helena Christensen, the very model from Wicked Game, for his calendar A Homage to Women. Gucci didn’t just link Moss to the song Ritts made famous; they linked her to the artist who once photographed her alongside the star of the original video. The circle closes, thirty years later, exactly where it began.
Herb Ritts himself had a fascinating, if fragile, life story. He grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Los Angeles, where he lived next door to actor Steve McQueen, whom he later described as a “second father.” Throughout his career, during which he photographed Madonna, Cindy Crawford, and Michael Jackson, he secretly lived with HIV. Not even his own mother knew, she only found out the night he died in 2002.
The real origin of the concept: Pass This On
The most surprising connection, though, has nothing to do with Ritts or Isaak, but with Johan Renck himself. The Primavera campaign is, in essence, a direct visual reincarnation of a music video Renck made 23 years earlier for Swedish electronic duo The Knife, for their single Pass This On (2003).
The original video’s plot unfolds at a dull annual meeting of a local football club in the Swedish town of Kista. As the evening’s entertainment, drag performer Rickard Engfors takes the stage in a blonde wig and lip-syncs the song with real emotion. At first, it shocks and embarrasses the rough men and rural crowd, but gradually the music and his performance hypnotize everyone in the room until they all start dancing, giving in to the spell of the moment. At the time, Renck drew inspiration from a transvestite performance scene in Pedro Almodóvar’s High Heels.
Renck now applies that exact same mechanism to Gucci: a lone, mesmerizing figure, once a drag queen in provincial Sweden, now Kate Moss in a luxury setting, whose lip-sync in an enclosed room completely shifts the mood of everyone present and stirs something in them. This isn’t a copy of the Wicked Game video itself, then, but Renck’s own long-tested directorial formula, simply dressed up in a star-studded Gucci coat.
Who is Johan Renck
Before all this, Renck had a music career of his own under the name Stakka Bo, with the international hit Here We Go (1993), which went on to appear in an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head and the video game UEFA Euro 2004. He later shifted toward directing music videos for Madonna, Kylie Minogue, and David Bowie, for whom he directed his final two videos, Blackstar and Lazarus, shortly before Bowie’s death in 2016. Today, he’s best known as the Emmy-winning director of the miniseries Chernobyl.
