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About “Gucci Cruise 2020” by Harmony Korine
[1] What else can be learned from the oeuvre of Harmony Korine, specifically from his rare instances of commercial work?

This advertisement by Harmony Korine remains very much in the style of his cinematographic work by the usage of a handheld camera and strong lighting coming from behind the camera. He uses a wide range of characters and makes them a part of eerie, awkward scenes. The creative input of Harmony Korine is the casting method: the mix of perfectly styled, classically beautiful models and weird idiosyncratic characters interacting with those models on a seemingly equal level, but also the usage of weird, props and the awkward situations happening between the characters. It becomes evident, that Korine uses his class method of first writing down the scenes that he wants to see and letting that be his collage material. He also reserves space for improvisation of the characters and later, builds the narrative through the campaign from the footage of those scenes in the editing process.

With the introduction of old, peculiar-looking, punk, quirky people, he challenges the idea of depicting, only perfect rich, intelligent, well-taken-care-of, beautiful, flawless characters in advertising campaigns for luxury fashion, creating an alluring piece of video art and hitting closer to home for artists and creatives who value variety and have enough of the monotonous language of luxury fashion’s advertising output. He arrives at it at a point where it is easy to realize that the typical, boring fashion campaign is in essence a parody of itself and does that by creating a clear, obvious parody by the means of inviting Gucci Mane, a pop-culture icon to star in the advertisement or make the flawless models and actors break character and e.g. start smearing their faces with edible jelly, riding BMX bikes or breaking porcelain plates with motorcycle tires.