>>> Asian Market Updte

Asia Market Update: Mixed trading session for Asia; S&P 500 FUTs underperform, US banks and Airlines decline in afterhours; Fed official ‘surprised’ by Treasury’s move related to unused stimulus funds; Trump to participate in APEC meeting

General Trend:
- Topix Insurance and Air Transportation indices are among the decliners in Japan
- Energy firms decline in Australia while Financials rise
- Hang Seng TECH index rises, property index drops (China Overseas Land trades at 52-week low)
- Shanghai Composite traded flat during the morning session; Industrials rose, Financials dropped amid corporate debt concerns
- China expands probe related to banks and the recent default by Yongcheng Coal
- China bill yields rise at auction; PBOC drained more liquidity
- Deflation concerns reappear in the headlines after Japan inflation data
- Asian central banks continue to move to deal with currency strength (Thailand)
- Commodity currencies pare early losses

Headlines/Economic Data
Australia/New Zealand
-ASX 200 opened flat
- (AU) Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA): Banks using committed liquidity facilities can increase holdings of high-quality liquid assets (HQLA); banks can raise holdings of HQLA to 27% by the end of 2020, to 30% by the end of 2021
- (AU) Australia Preliminary Oct Retail Sales M/M: +1.6% v -1.1% prior
- (AU) South Australia State Premier: To lift restrictions [3 days] earlier than expected, restrictions to be removed at midnight on Nov 21st; Contact tracers were misled by one contact who lied

China/Hong Kong
-Hang Seng opened +0.2%, Shanghai Composite -0.1%
- (CN) Industrial Bank, Zhongyuan Bank [1216.HK] and Everbright Bank to be probed by China in relation to default by Yongcheng Coal - financial press
- (CN) China to probe domestic ratings agencies, relates to the recent default by Yongcheng Coal - SCMP
- Greenland Holdings [600606.CN]: The state-backed property firm held a call on Thursday with investors; followed default concerns and a sharp rise seen in the co's 2025 bond yields - Nikkei
- *(CN) CHINA MONTHLY LOAN PRIME RATE (LPR) SETTING: 1-YEAR AND 5-YEAR RATES UNCHANGED (rates left unchanged for 7th straight month)
- (CN) China PBOC sets Yuan reference rate: 6.5786 v 6.5484 prior
- (CN) China PBoC Open Market Operation (OMO): Injects CNY80B in 7-day reverse repos v Injects CNY70B in 7-day reverse repos prior; Net drain CNY80B v Net drain CNY50B prior
- (CN) China Virus Expert Zhong Nanshan: Urges mass coronavirus testing in Hong Kong
- (HK) Hong Kong Govt to suspend classes for Primary levels 1-3 [for 2 weeks]
-(CN) Japan Foreign Min Motegi confirms China Foreign Min Wang to visit Japan on Nov 24-25th

Japan
-Nikkei 225 opened -0.6%
- *(JP) JAPAN OCT NATIONAL CPI Y/Y: -0.4% V -0.4%E; CPI EX-FRESH FOOD (CORE) Y/Y: -0.7% V -0.7%E (lowest annual rate for core CPI since late 2010)
- *(JP) JAPAN NOV PRELIMINARY PMI MANUFACTURING: 48.3 V 48.7 PRIOR; PMI Services: 46.7 v 47.7 prior

Korea
-Kospi opened -0.1%
- (KR) South Korea Oct PPI Y/Y: -0.6% v -0.4% prior

Other Asia
- (TH) Bank of Thailand Assistant (BoT) Gov Vachira: Eases rules on FX deposits to encourage capital outflows; To allow Domestic investors to invest more in foreign securities, raise the overseas investment limit for institutional investors

North America
- (US) Treasury Sec Mnuchin sends letter to Fed's Powell requesting 90 day extension of Fed's Commercial Paper Funding Facility, Primary Dealer Credit Facility, Money Market Liquidity Facility, and Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility; Calls on Fed to return unused stimulus funds to the Treasury
- (US) Treasury Sec Mnuchin; Financial conditions are quite strong; hopes $580B in leftover funds [from Fed] are used to help the economy (returned to treasury)
- (US) Fed Bostic (dove, non-voter): Given where economy is, is prudent to keep emergency facilities open; Was a bit surprised by US Treasury decision [related to unused Fed stimulus funds]; When households burn through their savings will signal a tipping point requiring more Fed engagement
- (US) Sen Schumer says Majority Leader McConnell has agreed to resume negotiations over Covid-19 stimulus – CNBC
- (US) VP Biden says he has picked someone to be Treasury Secretary and will announce soon after Thanksgiving – press
- (US) President Trump to participate in APEC meeting at 06:50 AM ET on Nov 20th ( Friday)
- (US) SEMI Oct North America-based Manufacturers of Semi Equipment Billings: $2.64B, -3.7% m/m and +26.9% y/y
-Gilead [GILD]: World Health Organization (WHO) recommends against use of Remdesivir for COVID-19
- (US) California govt reportedly to impose a 'limited' stay at home order for more than 40 counties that are in the 'purple/widespread' COVID zone - local press

Europe
- (UK) UK-EU trade deal reportedly could be announced next Monday - UK's Telegraph
- (UK) Nov GfK Consumer Confidence: -33 v -31 prior

Levels as of 00:20 ET
- Nikkei 225, -0.4%, ASX 200 -0.1% , Hang Seng +0.4%; Shanghai Composite +0.1% ; Kospi flat
- Equity S&P500 Futures: -0.4%; Nasdaq100 +0.1%, Dax +0.1%; FTSE100 +0.2%
- EUR 1.1882-1.1865 ; JPY 103.91-103.73 ; AUD 0.7298-0.7265 ;NZD 0.6930-0.6904
- Gold +0.1% at $1,863/oz; Crude Oil -0.1% at $41.88/brl; Copper +0.2% at $3.2228/lb

FT : How the private equity industry stole a march in European payments

How the private equity industry stole a march in European payments
The rise of the Italian group Nexi reveals how buyout firms seized an opportunity dropped by many banks

Just over a decade ago, processing electronic payments was largely regarded as a dull back-office function, including by the banks that did it.

A deal this week to create one of Europe’s largest payments companies is a reminder of a group that took a very different view and stepped into reap the rewards: private equity firms.

Italian payments group Nexi acquired Danish rival Nets for €7.8bn, combining two businesses that began life in banks but were then carved out and run by buyout groups Advent, Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman. Nexi snapped up Nets just weeks after striking a tie-up with domestic competitor Sia, a run of deals that will value the group at €22bn.

Payments companies help merchants accept in-store or online payments, charging a proportion of the value of each transaction. With the need to invest in technology creating high fixed costs, the payment sector’s model has unleashed a race for scale well suited to the dealmaking that underpins the private equity industry.

The pandemic has done little to cool the pace of acquisitions. Almost $32bn of transactions have been struck in the European payments industry this year, up from $8.5bn in the same period in 2019, according to Refinitiv.

The relentless acquisitions have helped catapult the market value of the payment industry’s biggest players, including newly expanded Nexi and French rival Worldline, above some European lenders, underlining how banks failed to capitalise on the opportunity.

Owning payment companies “has been one of private equity’s biggest investment successes”, said Charles Hayes, a partner at law firm Freshfields which has advised on several deals.

Nexi and Nets were not the private equity industry’s first foray into payments, and nor are buyout groups the only ones to have scrambled for a foothold in a fast-growing market. But their tangled history illustrates how private equity stepped in where many banks had failed to capitalise, just as ecommerce and digital payments took off.

Tangled history
In 2014, Advent and Bain snapped up Nets, itself forged five years earlier from the merger of two Nordic bank-owned payments groups. A year later, the firms, alongside the Italian private equity group Clessidra, bought Istituto Centrale delle Banche Popolari Italiane (ICBPI), founded shortly before the second world war by a group of Italian banks. They renamed it Nexi.

A dizzying whirlwind of takeovers, take-privates and listings was only just beginning for Nexi and Nets.

After listing in 2016, Nets was taken private the following year by a consortium led by Hellman & Friedman and including Advent and Bain. In 2018, Nets snapped up German payments group Concardis, also owned by Advent and Bain. Meanwhile, Nexi hoovered up a series of smaller payments groups before listing in what was Europe’s largest initial public offering of 2019.


“It has been an incredibly successful subsegment to focus on — definitely one of the most interesting we’ve seen in private equity,” said James Brocklebank, managing partner at Advent. “It’s a question of focus . . . banks recognise these are good businesses [but] are not necessarily in the best position to develop the technology and to spend the money on driving payments as its own profit centre.” 

The takeovers have left a legacy of relatively high debts. Nets’ net leverage is 4.8 times, and the combined group with Nexi and Sia will have 3.3 times, according to an investor presentation. After the Nets deal, 38 per cent of Nexi’s shares will be in public investors’ hands. Most of the remaining will be held by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, the Italian government vehicle that backed Sia, as well as Advent, Bain and Hellman & Friedman. 

What few dispute is that the industry’s push into payments has been lucrative. Since 2008, buyout firms’ investment in the payments sector have returned 2.7 times the amount of equity invested, compared to 2.1 times for financial services deals and 2.3 times in technology, according to a report this year by management consultancy Bain & Company.

The aggressive inroads into the European payments industry by buyout firms was made possible by the Payment Services Directive, a 2009 piece of legislation from the European Commission that paved the way for non-banks to provide payments services.

The expansion has not been without controversy.

In 2010, private equity made its first major move into European payments. Advent and Bain Capital bought Royal Bank of Scotland’s payments business at a £2bn valuation after EU regulators forced the bank to sell the unit as a condition of its bailout during the financial crisis. 

By the time the business, renamed Worldpay, floated in London in 2015, it commanded a valuation of £6.3bn. Just two years later, US payments processor Vantiv swallowed it for £9.1bn. Based on Worldpay’s IPO valuation, the buyout firms made a return of 5.4 times the equity they invested, according to an analysis by Peter Morris, an associate scholar at Oxford university’s Saïd Business School. Advent and Bain declined to comment on the deal’s returns.

The giddy increase in Worldpay’s valuation led some politicians to complain that UK taxpayers suffered a raw deal in the original sale in 2010. Last year Natwest, until recently known as Royal Bank of Scotland, got back into the industry, launching a service enabling small businesses to accept card payments in-store or online.


Race for scale 
The race for scale is only intensifying — and not just among the industry’s private-equity backed groups. In February, Worldline agreed to buy rival Ingenico for €7.8bn. In the US, the $43bn acquisition of Worldpay by financial tech specialist Fidelity National Information Services in early 2019 prompted panicked rivals to get bigger still.

“The process of consolidation will continue,” said Luca Bassi, a managing director at Bain Capital who oversaw the Nexi deal and sits on the company’s board. “There are a lot of countries where banks haven’t sold out their business.” 

But this year has not been straightforward for the payments industry, with the fraud at German group Wirecard focusing regulators’ attention on the lighter-touch treatment the industry enjoys compared to banks.

At the same time, the economic disruption unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic hit consumer spending, sending global revenues of payment groups tumbling by about 22 per cent between January and June, according to McKinsey — though industry executives insist a long-term shift towards online and contactless payments will ultimately offset that.

“The only thing that’s bad for us is payments in cash,” said Mr Bassi. While some electronic payments generate higher fees than others, he said, “everything where cash isn’t there, is good.”

In Nexi’s home market of Italy, for example, electronic payments represent only 25 per cent of all transactions, and Rome has recently vowed to fight tax evasion by encouraging digital payments. 

The buyout groups will probably sell down their stakes in the new Nexi business over the next few years. As they do, the payments industry that disrupted the banks is facing a fresh threat of its own: the prospect of a technology giant launching a global rival that, like China’s Alipay, offers merchants lower fees — or could cut out the intermediary altogether.

That is “a massive risk,” said one private equity dealmaker who specialises in financial services but has not invested in the payments industry.

“Nobody really knows where payments is headed — will it be in the cloud, or over blockchain?” he added. “Everybody is trying to get as big as possible so they can influence where payments ultimately ends up.”

>>> US Close Dow +0.15% S&P +0.39% Nasdaq +0.87% Russell +0.84%

Closing Stock Market Summary

The S&P 500 increased 0.4% on Thursday and overcome a sluggish start as buyers quietly eased their way back into the market. The Nasdaq Composite (+0.9%) and Russell 2000 (+0.8%) outperformed while the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased just 0.2%. 

For most of the day, the S&P 500 floated around its flat line, while the Nasdaq narrowed the monthly performance gap between it and the benchmark index amid strength in technology stocks. The S&P 500 information technology sector rose 0.8%, but the energy sector (+1.5%) advanced the most as the gains started to broaden out in the afternoon. 

The market appeared to get a small bump after Senate Minority Leader Schumer reportedly said Senate Majority Leader McConnell agreed to restart stimulus talks. Not the most surprising news since Mr. McConnell previously said he wanted a smaller deal before year-end, but good news, nonetheless. 

The utilities (-1.0%) and health care (-0.1%) sectors, which have underperformed this week, failed to participate in today's advance. 

In other positive developments, Phase 2 vaccine trial data from the AstraZeneca (AZN 54.03, +0.04, +0.1%)/Oxford collaboration showed encouraging immune responses in older patients, and October existing home sales increased at a faster-than-expected, seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.85 million (Briefing.com consensus 6.49 million). Market reactions were muted, but these were good for sentiment reasons. 

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (+1.6%) was another pocket of strength today. NVIDIA (NVDA 537.61, +0.46, +0.1%) beat top and bottom-line estimates and issued upside Q4 revenue guidance; Cree (CREE 81.00, +8.39, +11.6%) was upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan with a $90 price target.

Longer-dated Treasuries increased again, pushing yields even lower from last week's highs. The 2-yr yield was flat at 0.17%, and the 10-yr yield decreased three basis points to 0.85%. The U.S. Dollar Index decreased 0.1% to 92.27. WTI crude futures decreased 0.1% to $41.75/bbl. 

Reviewing Thursday's economic data:

  • Initial claims for the week ending November 14 rose by 31,000 to 742,000 ( consensus 720,000). Continuing claims for the week ending November 7 decreased by 429,000 to 6.372 million.
    • The key takeaway from the report is that it covers the period in which the survey for the November employment report is conducted. The jump in initial claims, which are still exceedingly high, will contribute to expectations for a slowdown in job growth in November.
  • Existing home sales increased 4.3% m/m in October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.85 million (consensus 6.49 million). October marked the fifth consecutive month of positive sales gains.
    • The key takeaway from the report is that it reflects robust demand for existing homes. That is constraining supply even further, which is going to be a pressure point that feeds higher prices, shuts out an increasing number of first-time buyers, and bolsters the prospects for new home sales.
  • The Conference Board's Leading Economic Index increased 0.7% m/m in October, as expected, marking the sixth straight month of positive readings. The index for September was unrevised at +0.7%.
    • The key takeaway from the report is that strength has become more widespread among the leading indicators.
  • The Philadelphia Fed Index decreased to 26.3 in November (consensus 25.0) from 32.3 in October.

Investors will not receive any notable economic data on Friday.

  • Nasdaq Composite +32.7% YTD
  • S&P 500 +10.9% YTD
  • Russell 2000 +6.9% YTD
  • Dow Jones Industrial Average +3.3% YTD

>>> US After Hours Summary: CAL +10.1%, WSM +6.7%, ROST +3.2% up on earnings; FE

After Hours Summary: CAL +10.1%, WSM +6.7%, ROST +3.2% up on earnings; FEYE +15.2% jumps on $400 mln investment led by Blackstone

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: NGVC +19.3% (also declares special dividend of $2/sh), CAL +10.1%, WSM +6.7%, QFIN +6.6%, ROST +3.2%, HP +1.3%

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: MESO +16.7% (MESO and NVS sign license and collaboration agreement for remestemcel-L), FEYE +15.2% (acquires Respond Software; also announces $400 mln investment led by Blackstone), AMRN +7.9% (shares Phase 3 Study of VASCEPA), MNKD +3.3% (receives $12.5 mln milestone payment from UTHR), AFMD +1.7% (announces publication of results Phase 1b study of AFM13), INCY +0.7% (LLY and INCY announce that the FDA issued a EUA for baricitinib to be used with remdesivir in COVID-19 patients), LLY +0.3% (LLY and INCY announce that the FDA issued a EUA for baricitinib to be used with remdesivir in COVID-19 patients), EIG +0.1% (new CEO)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: POST -8.7%, BEST -7.3% (also announces new strategic plan to focus on core businesses), WDAY -2.5%, MCFE -1.7%, INTU -0.6%, OOMA -0.1%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: AVRO -5.8% (stock offering), SFIX -3.2% (COO and interim CFO Mike Smith to resign), KIM -0.7% (increases dividend), SNAP -0.4% (buys app similar to TikTok, according to Business Insider), FB -0.3% (FTC and several AGs in final stages of filing antitrust complaints, according to Reuters; also Vietnam threatens FB over censorship requests, according to Reuters ), BF.A -0.1% (increases dividend), ADV -0.1% (stock offering)

(BofA) Zillennials Are Going to Change Investing Forever

Here come the Zillennials! Gen Y is out, Gen Z is in
They’ve never known a life without Google, 40% prefer hanging out with friends virtually than in real life, they will spend six years of their life on social media and they won’t use credit cards. They’re the ‘clicktivists’: flourishing in a decade of social rights movements, with 4 in 10 in our proprietary BofA seeing themselves as ‘citizens of the world'. The Gen Z revolution is starting, as the first generation born into an online world is now entering the workforce and compelling other generations to adapt to them, not vice versa. Thus, about to become most disruptive to economies, markets and social systems.

$33tn income by 2030, to pass Millennials by 2031
Gen Z’s economic power is the fastest-growing across all cohorts. This generation’s income will increase c.5x by 2030 to $33tn as they enter the workplace today, reaching 27% of global income and surpassing Millennials the year after. The growing consumer power of Gen Z will be even more powerful taking into account the ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ down the generations. The Baby Boomer and Silent generation US households alone are sitting on $78tn of wealth today.

9 in 10 live in EM, while DM suffers from “peak youth”
Gen Z could be EM’s secret weapon. APAC income already accounts for over a third of Gen Z’s income and will exceed North American and European combined income by 2035. ‘Peak youth’ milestones are being reached across the developed markets – Europe is the first continent to have more over-65s than under-15s, a club North America will join in 2022. In contrast, India stands out as the Gen Z country, accounting for 20% of the global generation, with improved youth literacy rates, urbanisation, and rapid expansion of technological infrastructure. Mexico, the Philippines and Thailand are just a few of the EM countries that we think have what it takes to capitalize on the Gen Z revolution.

Beneficiaries: eCommerce, payments, luxury, media, ESG
Gen Z is the online generation: nearly half are online ‘almost constantly’ and a quarter of them will spend 10+ hours a day on their phone. In our survey, over a quarter of Gen Z’s top payment choice was the phone, while credit cards weren’t even in their top 3. This generation is the least likely to pick experiences over goods, and values sustainable luxury – choosing quality over price as their top purchase factor.

“Peak” generation: alcohol, meat, cars, travel headwinds
Only half of US teens can drive, while our survey finds that less than half of Gen Z drink alcohol, and more than half have some kind of meat restriction. A third of them would trust a robot to make their financial decisions. Gen Z’s activist focus filters into their interactions with business, too – 80% factor ESG investing into their financial decisions, and they have also driven consumer-facing sustainability campaigns, such as single-use plastics. Harmful consumer sectors, such as fast fashion, may be the next focus.

FT : With Guccifest, Gucci swaps shows for short films

With Guccifest, Gucci swaps shows for short films
The luxury brand proposes an alternative to the catwalk with a week of films that are part art-house, part ad campaign

In May, when Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele announced the brand would be pulling out of Milan Fashion Week and rejecting seasonal shows for the foreseeable future, no one imagined the Italian brand would be starting up its own version. Yet, this week saw the launch of Gucci’s digital showcase — part fashion week, part film festival — that presents a series of seven short movies co-directed by Michele and Hollywood auteur Gus Van Sant, and available to watch online.

Altruistically perhaps, Gucci is sharing the platform with 15 independent young designers including Ahluwalia, Stefan Cooke, Bianca Saunders and Mowalola, who have created film shorts screened before and after each Gucci episode. By taking others on board it turns Gucci’s offering into something that competes with the online fashion weeks during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a big, bold statement, befitting a brand whose turnover reached €9.6bn in 2019, and it’s called Guccifest.

A film project is clever, given a hunger for at-home stimulus — Gucci’s are episodic, a film each day, keeping viewers coming back. “It was the first time we’ve done something like you’d find on Netflix,” said Van Sant, of Gucci’s films with their grand, overarching title Overture of Something That Never Ended. Each episode — four of which I have seen, before going to press — is like a disconnected snapshot, their only connection their protagonist, Italian actor, dancer and DJ Silvia Calderoni. The first episode is intimate and low key, seeing Calderoni stretching through yoga poses in a tulle Gucci jumpsuit and gold leather mules. In the second film, Calderoni visits a café, filled with lushly overdressed patrons. The third sees a visit to the post-office.


The films all embody Michele’s aesthetic, which is a little Seventies and a lot of vintage — the dodgy dubbing of dialogue is a deliberate nod to Italian films of the aforementioned period. They also have the ambiguous narratives and surreal dialogue that have marked many of Van Sant’s works: characters talk about eating flowers, and compare birds to beetroot. And they are each crammed with shots that linger over sumptuous Gucci clothes: even the queue waiting at that post-office affords Van Sant the opportunity to show ornate shoes, and logo-ed socks, and baroque birdcages (someone wants to mail one). The films all contain surreal moments, Calderoni, for example, selects a sequinned Gucci evening gown to wear to collect her post.



Images of the clothes that will ultimately be sold are released shortly after each film airs: “The fashion was part of the concept, and the casting was connected to the fashion,” said Van Sant. In his own movies costume hasn’t often played an important part — in Elephant (2003), Van Sant let his cast of new and non-professional actors wear their own wardrobe. Here, of course, everything is precisely chosen. However Gucci’s creative stance, which is often gender fluid, sexually ambivalent and youthful, also resonates with Van Sant’s oeuvre.

Audiences are also being lured via celebrity cameos from actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris, the musicians Florence Welch, Billie Eilish and Harry Styles, who appears in a deep telephone conversation with the 81-year-old Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, a neighbour of Michele. “I think when it comes to making art it’s about finding the thing that you always want to see, or listen to, that’s never been made,” says Styles, philosophically, wearing a sloganed pink Gucci T-shirt. “Fashion dresses humanity, art lays it bare,” responds Oliva — in Italian, from the post-office queue.


These are films undoubtedly in love with fashion. In the first, the sound of the fabric moving is intense, almost ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) in its soft rustling, and was specially recorded. “Gus was really fascinated with the idea — he really wanted people to feel the fabrics,” said Michele last Saturday, speaking from his apartment in Rome, the city where the films were made. “I was fascinated to get things from Gus, and he was fascinated to get things from me,” Michele said. “I am a fashion designer, but I feel myself like a costume designer, a director.” If Michele is a hybrid, these co-directed films feel so too, halfway between an art-house experiment and an advertising campaign — the latter not necessarily a bad thing.


Fashion films had, until the pandemic, often been perceived as cost-effective but emotionally lacklustre replacements to a live show. And just as watching live-streamed ballet and opera performances doesn’t have quite the same charge as experiencing the thing, a film can’t replicate the atmosphere of a catwalk show. That said, celebrity cameos within this selection adequately replicate the hysteria generated by starry front-rows — the episode featuring styles was broadcast at 10.30pm GMT, presumably to allow Styles’ considerable American fan base to watch. And, even with their obscure narratives, these films hold attention longer than a wordless filmed fashion show could.

Gucci hopes so. Of course, the ongoing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the fashion industry makes this a pivotal moment for the brand. Gucci’s recovery after the global devastating first half of 2020 has struggled along with its peers — a near-total shutdown of international tourism continues to drag on sales, which were down 12.1 per cent on a reported basis in the third quarter compared to the same period a year ago. E-commerce sales, however, are growing sharply, accounting for 12.6 per cent of Gucci’s retail sales over the quarter. So an online film series, driving traffic to your website, makes sense.


For now, Gucci has committed to showing outside the traditional show system — so too has Saint Laurent, also in the Kering group. It remains to be seen if the rest of the industry will scramble back to fashion shows as soon as they are able to, or if trials such as Gucci’s may show a new way for fashion to communicate. The feasibility of the menswear shows, currently scheduled for January in Milan and Paris, remains unclear. One tantalising question hangs: how do you show fashion, if you can’t stage a fashion show? Gucci’s is a compelling if not definitive answer.