Epiphany

Epiphany is a limited-edition photobook made by Ari Marcopoulos while embedded with Gucci's pre-fall 2016 shoot, one of a string of outsider collaborators creative director Alessandro Michele brought into the house's orbit.

Marcopoulos spent seven days photographing the collection inside a palazzo, deliberately working against the romance of the setting: flash rather than soft light, direct rather than composed. The book mixes black-and-white and color sections and was issued in a hand-numbered edition of 1,000, each copy including one of sixteen glossy snapshot cards tucked into a glassine pocket on the cover, a folded poster, and pink bubble-wrap packaging with a snake decal. The title plays on Dionysus, the god for whom the collection's signature bag was named.

Marcopoulos, born in the Netherlands and based in New York since 1980, has spent his career photographing the margins of American culture, skateboarders, graffiti writers, hip-hop and hardcore musicians, and figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Beastie Boys, and Epiphany carries that same loose, unposed eye into a fashion-house commission.