Gucci Valigeria: Ryan Gosling and the trunk

Luggage is a hard sell on film: a bag only gets interesting once it is going somewhere. Gucci’s answer for Valigeria, its travel line, is to send Ryan Gosling somewhere strange. He sets off from a motel, ends up on a beach, and on the way runs into something he cannot explain — a two-minute short that plays like the opening of a sci-fi film no one has made yet, to the sound of Heart’s “Magic Man”.

The trunk is the hinge. It is what leads Gosling to the unexpected, and it is also Gucci’s origin story: Guccio Gucci worked as a porter at The Savoy in London as a young man, and the luggage of the guests passing through became the first spark for his own atelier. Vintage pieces travel alongside the current Gucci Savoy collection, monogram and Web stripe on display, so the archive and the shop window share one frame.

Nobody says any of this in the film. The founding myth is in the props and the casting does the rest: one of the most watchable men in Hollywood, quietly baffled, holding onto his bags.