Where has the Swarovski Christmas tree in Milan gone?
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We recently wrote casually that you had to go admire the Swarovski Christmas tree in Milan, and now it has simply disappeared. ‘Where is the tree this year?!’ colleague Lotte texted me from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Including a photo. Without a tree. Although something else is in its place, which apparently raised eyebrows not only with us but all over Italy.
From Swarovski Christmas tree to Gucci stack
At the commercial intersection, there is therefore no enormous green tree with lush branches, twinkling lights, and sparkling crystals, but a stack of Gucci suitcases. In the shape of a kind of tree, that much is true. The Christmas tree – or Christmas stack – carries the title ‘The gift of love’, for which the fashion house had to lay down about a million to sponsor the whole thing, besides love. You have to come from a good house if you want to dethrone the Swarovski tree.
Swarovski had been sponsoring the Christmas tree for the city since 2013, and erected an impressive Christmas tree with crystals every year that became a kind of showcase for Christmas in Milan. Gucci apparently found the tree outdated, because instead, the fashion house opted for an installation of 78 white and silver gift boxes with Gucci's Horsebit buckle and logo on them. The same gift boxes that also decorate Gucci's windows this year. I would have used those examples myself to make the tree in the shopping center a few meters taller.
‘A bit strange’
Even before the tree was traditionally unveiled together with the Christmas decorations in the dome of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele on Monday, sneaky photos were already circulating on the internet. These immediately provoked resistance among the Italians. ‘It's not ugly, but the Galleria deserves more,’ reads one of the comments. Another jokes that ‘foreign tourists suddenly miss their luggage at Malpensa.’ Nevertheless, Mayor Giuseppe Sala, Anna Dello Russo, Margherita Buy, and Gucci President & CEO Jean-François Palus neatly showed up to ceremoniously unveil the Gucci tree with a press of the light button. The Milanese mayor then honestly admitted: ‘un poco strano,’ or: a bit strange.
