Who is Sabato De Sarno? A Gucci Story review: TV, with extra dressing

Glitzy corporate video, or a brave new world of spatial entertainment? It can be both. This much is certain: you’ve never experienced a documentary quite like Who is Sabato De Sarno? A Gucci Story, which was one of the earliest pieces of content developed for the Apple Vision Pro—a bittersweet milestone in the sense it’s really one great big commercial for the fashion brand, and a puff piece about its creative director, Sabato de Sarno. Given sprightly narration by Paul Mescal, adopting the tone of a tipsy person at a bar attempting to hold a stranger’s interest, the film chronicles the lead up to de Sarno’s first Gucci fashion show, dropping in various tidbits about his life and the company’s history.

Instead of ensconcing our senses in full wraparound virtual reality, or using the immersive 180 video format, the developers display the doco on a two-dimensional screen inserted in front of us (thus relying on a sectioned off area we tend to call “the frame,” which has long dominated older artistic mediums—for instance paintings and cinema—the abolition of it being one of the essential features of virtual and mixed reality experiences). But there’s a twist. Throughout the runtime, which clocks in at around 20 minutes, the experience deploys elements that appear outside the flat screen, incorporated into the space around it, an arena previously inaccessible to artists, existing outside the literal borders of their work.

In an early scene at an airport, for instance, we see a driver waiting to pick up De Sarno right before a plane flies over our heads, whooshing above the screen and through our home. Similarly, when De Sarno is shown boarding a tram, a digital rendering of the vehicle appears in our real world environment, traveling rightwards. In another fun moment, when the film records De Sarno entering his office in Milan for the first time, discovering the room has been filled with burgundy red balloons, a big bunch appear in space too, floating towards the ceiling.

These embellishments are unquestionably gimmicky, deployed to zhuzh things up, adding some pop and bling. Also gimmicky, aesthetically as well as interactively, are objects that appear before us which can be examined and rotated, as if we’re potential customers sizing up a purchase. When for instance the documentary mentions an iconic Gucci bag, with black leather and a gold strap, we’re given the ability to summon it into virtual existence; if we do, the film pauses while we flip it around in the air and take a squiz. It wouldn’t take much for the creators to add a call to action taking us to a website where we could buy one for real; such an addition in fact feels inevitable. 

This could be the “brave new world” suggested at the start of this review, that hitherto inaccessible space around the screen inevitably exploited for commercial gain (how it might be used to tell stories, or at least for non-gimmicky purposes, remains an open question). In that sense Who is Sabato De Sarno? might be considered a harbinger of things to come. It suggests a future where elements from the idiot box jump out of their cage, boxed in no more, and dance about before us, probably asking us to buy this or that, or advertising some other experience to consume our time, while a layer of non-interactive media passively plays in the background. 

What stops me from declaring a potential “new era of television” is the retrograde flavour of it all: two steps forward, one step back, the future by way of the past, an emerging medium resting on the grammar and syntax of an older one that’s been technologically superseded. If somebody were asked to brainstorm potential use cases for spatial entertainment, with its boundless horizons and infinite possibilities, it’d take a lame mind—or a person on a budget—to think “television, with extra visual dressing.” But perhaps, to be fair, the idea for this production could’ve come from a producer who already had a film in the bag, using the launch of a spiffy new headset as an opportunity to add some bells and whistles. 

I suspect that might have been the case with Who is Sabato De Sarno?, with some reportage appearing to back that up . If this format catches on, even in some small way, maybe it’s ultimate purpose will be as a kind of gateway drug, nudging open the doors of perception, prompting content creators to think in spatial-friendly terms. Or maybe we’ll just be able to buy those bags.