What’s better than one cover girl? Two cover girls…or something like that. It is unsurprising that, in the fashion industry, designers have similar ideas to one another. That’s how we’ve ended up with so many goth-inspired collections this fashion month, especially given the state of the world in recent times. However, sometimes the minds of designers seemingly connect telepathically, and an obscure idea ends up together simultaneously. At Gucci and Sunnei’s Spring 2023 shows, that would be the idea of the twin.

One of the most hotly anticipated shows of any Milan Fashion Week is Alessandro Michele’s Gucci, and this show certainly lived up to some expectations and subverted others. Moments before the show commenced, an email from Gucci announced “Welcome to Twinsburg” and then out came 68 pairs of twins onto the runway - not an easy task to pull off strategically. This isn’t the first time we have seen Michele utilise twins. Earlier this year at the 2022 met gala, Michele and Jared Leto arrived on the red carpet in matching looks, even down to their hairstyle. It was only last month that Gucci referenced the infamous twins from The Shining as part of their Stanley Kubrick collection. But, where has this inspiration come from? “I am the son of two mothers,” the show notes stated, Michele’s mother was a twin herself.

Just hours after the Gucci show, Sunnei unveiled their array of twins (how many pairs of twins exist in the modelling world?!). Whilst the Gucci show felt like a classic runway, Sunnei was performative art. As the first twin shuffled themselves from the row of seats and onto the runway and posed, another twin was waiting in the wings with a different look. Twin number one walked towards a white revolving door and out came twin number two. Of course, Sunnei’s Simone Rizzo wasn’t overly pleased that their idea was identical (yes, a pun) to Gucci's, “We’ve been working on our concept for months on end, and getting the twin casting right was quite the nightmare,”.

Images: Filippo Fior

While they may say their ideas aren’t similar, they both share a common thread. The idea of otherness in fashion. “Clothes are not enough,” said Michele, “When we are many, we are much stronger,”, a note of hope in a global atmosphere of tension. “It’s a metaphor of how fashion can act as a transformative force, which is as magical as it is utterly crazy,”, said Sunnei’s designers. With intricate commentary on politics both within the fashion world and the world in a larger sense, both of these shows made an impact. And, has me asking the question ‘how on earth did they manage to cast so many twins?’.

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