The maximal Italian brand reaches new heights with its Paramount bootleg.

Since the arrival of creative director of Mr Alessandro Michele at Gucci in 2015, the illustrious Italian fashion house has earned itself something of a reputation for slapping the most unlikely of adornments onto its eye-catching output and somehow making it work. Over the past few seasons, we’ve seen the likes of Snoopy, baseball franchises and a menagerie of snarling panthers, slithering snakes and swooping bats across T-shirts and knitwear. Bats. That’s not to mention the reappropriation of other brands’ branding: the Gucci logo in fonts more commonly associated with the Japanese video game developer Sega and what looks like the one utilised by the Seattle grunge pacesetters Nirvana, as well as the reworking of counterfeits of its own products, sometimes labelled “Guccy”, just for added inauthenticity. But its latest might be its most brazen: for its AW18 collection, the mischievous maximalist marque has ramped up its cultural snaffling to Hollywood proportions.

Assuming you’ve seen a blockbuster movie since the introduction of the talkies, you will probably recognise the logo on the front of the vibrant red and huggably soft velvet-blend sweatshirt above (also look out for the cotton tee). Founded way back in 1912, Paramount Pictures is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world and the only one of the so called “Big Six” still located in the Hollywood neighbourhood of Los Angeles itself. The mountain of the logo, meanwhile, isn’t officially anywhere at all. According to legend, it is based on a doodle that Paramount founder Mr WW Hodkinson drew on a napkin in the very early days of the studio. It was said to hark back to his memories of Utah, where he grew up – and bears a resemblance to Ben Lomond on the Wasatch Range – but has since been likened to Artesonraju in Peru, Monviso in Italy and the Matterhorn on the Swiss-Italian border. Its latest incarnation, which made its debut in 2010’s Iron Man 2, takes its cues from Mount Everest’s south col. Like Gucci, the studio has been creative with its iconography, as well as geography.

As for the stars, there were originally 24, in tribute to the number of actors on the studio’s books – this was cut to 22 in 1974. With its accompanying fanfare, it’s an image that’s integral to cinematic history, and one that captures the anticipation ahead of a great movie. The list of classic films to feature this watermark include The Godfather and its sequels, Psycho and the highlights of Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s portfolio, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr Ripley, Airplane!, Coming To America, Titanic, No Country For Old Men, the entire Star Trek and Indiana Jones franchises as well as, er, Hot Tub Time Machine 2. Reason enough to have it emblazoned on a sweater, then.

And for Gucci, this represents a foray into the foothills of Hollywood. If the mountain will not come to Mr Michele…

Shop the Gucci collection here