The Jojo's Bizarre Adventure series is well known for its characters' unique poses and strange sense of style, but the real life fashion runway can often feature some equally bizarre outfits, and this similarity caught the eye of designer Frida Giannini at Gucci, leading to one of the oddest yet most logical collaborations of all time.
The one-shot manga Jolyne, Fly High with GUCCI! is a 25-page story written by the creator of the series, Hirohiko Araki, which saw release in December of 2012. As the title implies, it focuses on the star of Stone Ocean, Jolyne Cujoh. One of the most unusual aspects of the manga is that it didn't originally run in a typical manga magazine like Jojo's home series Ultra Jump, but rather a fashion magazine called SPUR, published by the same publisher, Shueisha. Its status as a collaboration actually led it to receive an official, digital release in English through Gucci's social media pages, which made this strange little spin-off Jolyne's first officially translated manga appearance in English, as Stone Ocean has still not had a proper English release to this day.
Jolyne, Fly High with GUCCI! follows Jolyne as she waits at an airport for a flight to Tokyo, shortly after the death of her mother (and Jotaro's ex-wife). A point is made of the fact that, prior to her death, Jolyne's mother had arranged to have all of her clothes tailored for Jolyne. As she waits, Jolyne is confronted by two government agents and another man, all of whom should have familiar faces to Jojo fans if not Jolyne herself. They're hunting for a unicorn, which apparently has some significant value to the government. Jolyne spots it and sees that it's injured; it approaches her looking for help, but the agents spot her with it. Between panels, the unicorn vanishes, and the pattern on her scarf changes to include it. Jolyne recognizes that she's dreaming, and takes it as a good omen.
The government agents are portrayed by Bucciarati and Abbacchio, two characters from Golden Wind who aided Giorno and died over the course of the story. The third man is Polpo, a villainous character who the pair previously worked for, and who also died during the course of Golden Wind. While Gucci isn't invoked by name in the one-shot, the story has a focus on the significance of clothing and what it can mean to a person, and it features several splash pages of Jolyne wearing complex outfits based on Gucci's 2013 CRUISE fashion line. The magazine also played it in reverse, featuring a cover image of a model dressed to resemble Jolyne's appearance in the short.
While this story is generally considered non-canonical, its status as a dream offers some flexibility for fans who do appreciate it. Since all three Golden Wind characters would be dead by the time Stone Ocean begins, their appearance could be explained by a visitation from beyond, especially since Bucciarati in particular is known to do this. Jolyne's mother does not die over the course of Stone Ocean, which is the main reason it's not considered canon, but again, this could just be a fear expressed in her dreams rather than a literal recounting of events. After all, as far as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure goes, dead strangers and unicorns wouldn't even be that strange of a dream, especially if they provide a reason to sneak in some stunning Gucci fashion poses.