Action: Driving a white ’53 Jaguar, a woman clad in tight black leather speeds across a skyscraper-flanked bridge to the hauntingly remixed electropop of Depeche Mode’s “Strangelove” (“I give in to sin/ Because you have to make this life livable…”). She screeches to a halt, steps out of the car (close-up on her Gucci leather-and-croc platform stilettos), and flashes back to a pulse-pounding encounter between herself and a smoldering stranger in a bar.
Enter the femme fatale: Evan Rachel Wood, the 22-year-old Golden Globe–nominated actress and star of Thirteen, The Wrestler, and Across the Universe. Choosing Wood to be the Guilty one was a slick move on Giannini’s part: Not only is she “such a talented and beautiful girl,” as Giannini says, but she brims with intrigue, famous for her unsubtly subversive transformation from a perky blond actress with a wide smile to a mysterious pinup girl with a penchant for blood red lips and black tattoos. Now engaged to Marilyn Manson, Wood starred in the singer’s “Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)” video as a wide-eyed fan who has sex with Manson amid a downpour of blood.
“Guilty is about a guilty pleasure,” Wood says. “Full throttle, living in the moment, living dangerously. A girl with a bit of wild side. Scent plays a big role in what you’re turned on by. When you fall in love with someone, and you take a piece of their clothing or smell that pillow—it kills you.”
Wood recently finished filming HBO’s upcoming ’30s-set miniseries Mildred Pierce, a remake of the 1945 film noir starring Joan Crawford, an actress Wood says she’s “idolized my whole life.” Crawford didn’t exactly comprise a tidy Hollywood package, and neither does Wood—but no one could deny either woman’s devotion to her livelihood. By channeling the same fierce integrity that they would bring to a feature film, Wood, Miller, and Evans have lent Gucci’s newest fragrance an inextricable artfulness.
“A guiding rule of mine was that there would be nothing that wouldn’t be gorgeous—the car, the woman, the buildings,” Miller says. “I was on the lookout for the tiniest speck of anything that would’ve looked less than lovely. With Frida on the set, I hardly had to—she’s got an eagle eye. She knows exactly what she wants.”
“I think everyone, in the past, has had a moment—something romantic or sexy or sensual—that lasts for the rest of their lives,” Giannini says. “That’s the provocation for the commercial: the essence of the strong experience. I hope these images will stay in people’s minds for a long time.”
