Gucci’s in the middle of a seismic change. Alessandro Michele’s aesthetic and visual impact is still all over the brand, while Sabato De Sarno, the recently appointed new creative director, will show his first collection in September. The Gucci design studio has a rare opportunity to go carte blanche. Like in case of their last indie-sleazy menswear collection, the in-house designers of the mega-brand are enamored with Tom Ford’s era, but revisit his slim-lined heritage through a quirky, Michele-lens. Heart-shaped faux-fur collars on coats and heart-shaped panniers on party dresses; crystal-trimmed portholes on a black shift and slip dresses constructed from see-through sequins; high-drama faux fur chubbies and low-key boyfriend jeans and button-downs; and on the accessories front: oversized double G buckles, a horsebit handbag revived from 2003, metal spike heels about half as high as their ’90s progenitors, and a couple pairs of mukluks. The casting told a story about heritage, too. Amy Wesson, Guinevere Van Seenus, and Liisa Winkler all walked vintage Tom Ford runways. At the end of the show, design team members by the dozen emerged on the green-carpeted show venue to take a group bow. The point was made: Gucci is far more than whomever occupies the creative director seat. Still, it’s a crucial role, the instinctive force that stitches a collection into a unified whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
The menswear Milan Fashion Week started with the first Gucci show without Alessandro Michele’s creative direction. The designer’s abrupt exit in the end of 2022 left the brand in a confusing position. Michele’s Gucci definitely needed some rest – those last collections were just over-the-top, feeling more like a parade of costumes. Nevertheless, the designer created an inclusive wonderland with his vision for the Italian brand. And the studio-designed autumn-winter 2023 collection foreshadows the end of that colorful world that kept the industry dreaming for the last seven years. Skinny boys are in, bland indie-sleaziness is in, subtle (but very subtle) echoes of Tom Ford are in. The first look said it all: a white T-shirt with oversized chinos, From this beginning unfolded a collection that Gucci said in its notes was an act of improvisation, a freestyle “reflection of the individualities represented by the multifaceted creatives and craftsmen who inhabit the house of Gucci.” In other words, a collection that lacked overall coherence. After the opener we drifted into a section of volumized tailoring which was possibly purposefully banal. Suiting with detachable arms and legs, a rugby shirt worn above an unpicked trouser-like skirt, oversized vintage-design womenswear bags with Tom Ford era hardware and hilariously described “vintage-like” silk scarfs used ’90s-style to patch denim were more dynamic elements. We saw the occasional horse bit loafer, apparently distressed. Around halfway through, the collection began to come freighted with identity beyond the jackets featuring a 1953-issue logo boasting of outlets spanning “Florence-Rome-Milan-New York” (plus those near-ubiquitous pirate’s boots and sailor’s beanies). Volume was replaced by indie sleaze in a section epitomized by a look featuring black patent-sheened five-pocket pants, and a sheer scarlet shirt that strangely echoed the first ever look put out by Michele. The furry leopard bag and pink boots that accompanied it added a touch of hustler-ish glunge. Moto pieces, knitwear, and pastel sportswear were thrown in to evoke a purposefully peripatetic, thrown-together aesthetic. Thick socks worn over jeans is a thing to consider, though. Still, this isn’t a good moment in Gucci’s history.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
In the minutes before Gucci’s spring-summer 2023 show, an email came in. “Welcome to Twinsburg,” read the subject line. Alessandro Michele’s concept this season was a reflection on identity and otherness. Michele, it turns out, is the child of an identical twin. “I am the son of two mothers,” the show notes began. Mum Eralda and Mum Giuliana “shared a genetic solidarity but, above all, they shared an intimacy which was inaccessible to others.” There’s something captivating, even uncanny, about twins – we’ve all seen the photo of Michele and his friend Jared Leto, tuxedoed doppelgängers at the 2022 Met Gala. The Gucci creative director played up the intrigue here, dividing the audience in two via a partition lined floor to ceiling with portraits of twins and look-alikes by Mark Peckmezian and staging two simultaneous shows without either half understanding until the last models made their way down the runway. Then the wall of photos lifted, revealing another set of bleachers and another set of models wearing identical looks. For the finale, the twins emerged from opposite sides of the set, stretched their arms across the runway, and joined hands.
In true Michele fashion, the collection’s 68 looks didn’t need doubles to make an impact. He worked his way through strict tailoring, souped-up activewear, Hollywood Boulevard glitz, embroidered chinoiserie, red carpet glam, and country quilting, among other motifs. The sequined jacket that announced FUORI!!! was Michele’s nod to an early 1970s magazine produced by the Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano, and the stuffed animal handbags were Gremlins, stars of the 1980s black comedy of the same name. A helpful fellow journo pointed out that the Gremlins had a propensity for multiplying, which gets back to Michele’s explorations around identity. He pointed out another twinning detail in the men’s garter pants that revealed a bare expanse of upper thigh. Garters are historically associated with women’s hosiery; we aren’t used to seeing that part of a man’s anatomy. Highly eclectic visual allure and conceptual interpretations aside, it’s the solidarity of twins that Michele was really tapped into. In his post-show press conference, he seemed troubled by the climate crisis, growing anti-gay sentiment, and the renewed threat of nuclear war. “Clothes are not enough,” he said, adding that the filial atmosphere backstage was “therapeutic” for him and his team. “When we are many, we are much stronger,” he argued. This show made you believe it.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Once upon a time (last Monday), a tribe of cosmic goddesses and priests landed in Puglia and inhabited Castel del Monte – the extraordinary, 13th century castle that actually looks like an alien spaceship. All thanks to Gucci and its resort 2023 fashion show event. Alessandro Michele’s line of reasoning has never been linear. The collections he creates are prismatic affairs, as visually diverse as they are infused by meanings sometimes impervious to easy deciphering. His fascination for layered references and his love of history make him a collector of objects and memories, an archivist of galaxies of images. Not surprisingly, he called this collection “Cosmogonies“. At Gucci, Michele has brought his collections to places of esoteric, disquieting charm – the Promenade des Alycamps in Arles, an ancient necropolis, or Rome’s Musei Capitolini overlooking the Fori Imperiali, where archeological remains give off vibes of splendor and decay. But as far as magical thinking goes, Castel del Monte surely upstages his previous settings. In the castle’s timelessly edgy construction, the number eight was obsessively repeated as an arcane bearer of meaning. It goes without saying that Michele was drawn to the genius loci of this rather setting. “I was looking for a place which gave grace to the mythological,” he explained. “It’s a site where measurements and proportions cross each other as if by magic – the same way measurements of collars and jackets can be somehow magical.” For Michele, the mystery of Castel del Monte resonates with the enigmatic genesis of his creativity, “which operates through the need of putting together constellations of signs and symbols.” Michele’s collections seem to be part of a complex, well orchestrated flux of consciousness, gelled into attractive visual dénouements. While widely Instagram-compelling and immediate, they’re often substantiated by high-falutin, erudite citations. The idea of “cosmogonies of constellations” was born after a reading of German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s essay on Walter Benjamin, whose library was confiscated by the Gestapo, leaving him unable to access to the eclectic network of other people’s thoughts that nurtured his entire oeuvre.
Michele has often built on the tension and vitality of the past to write his own version of the present. “Clothes are mediums, strata of languages,” he said. “Today, ‘making fashion’ doesn’t mean just being a tailor, or chronicling just a one-dimensional narration. Putting together a collection has to do with talking about your idea of the world, because fashion is deeply connected to life and to humanity. Fashion isn’t just a hieroglyph that only élites can understand. It’s about life, it speaks a multitude of idioms, it’s like a huge choir from which nobody has to be excluded. It’s like being at sea, in the ocean, and casting out someone or something is not being fair to the complexity of life.” The designer’s journey this season manifested in a show intended “as a rave,” he explained, where his skills as a costume designer were boosted by the theatricality exuded by the location. “I thought the castle shouldn’t be kept shrouded in silence, but had to be lived and celebrated as it probably was when it was built, a sort of California, the Silicon Valley of the time.” Under a serendipitous full moon, his constellation of characters paraded around the fortress, lit by projections of stars and galaxies. While the idea of cosmogony was only tangentially translated into actual shapes or decorations, the designer’s recurrent theme of metamorphosis was hinted at through unobtrusive prosthetic insertions in some dresses, and also by an unrelenting, flowing panoply of divergences. Chatelaines and go-go girls, demure bourgeois ladies and spectacular nocturnal creatures, long-limbed lovers of bondage sheathed in thigh-high, laced-up stiletto-boots and romantic heroïnes swathed in yards of velvet—it was a feast of coherent discordances, tied together by historical references (portrait collars, plissé gorgets, crusaders’ capes, trains, and medieval crinolines) and by the “incendiary shimmer,” as he called it, of luminous textures under the light. “Women have often worn constellations on their bodies,” Michele said in a sort of conceptual pirouette. “Just think of Marilyn Monroe’s famous last dress studded with crystals; she looked like the beautiful tail of an impalpable comet.” What comes around goes around, but no one performs past-to-present magic quite like Michele.
It’s infuriating how huge brands that preach values of “inclusivity”, “love” and “peace” choose to stay silent in case of Russian invasion of Ukraine. I had a different attitude towards labels that showed their collections and decided to stay silent on the first day of the conflict (like Prada) – everybody was confused. But now is the high time to act, and most of the Western European fashion companies and insiders still pretend to be asleep. Gucci‘s silence is telling – not a single social media post in plain sight that would acknowledge the disheartening situation. Why is that? Kering and other luxury conglomerates are just too scared they won’t sell another pair of shoes to its major customer target, largely located in Russia, which supports Putin’s war crime towards Ukraine. As simple as that.
Alessandro Michele‘s autumn-winter 2022 fashion show failed to share any gesture of solidarity with Ukrainians, even though I thought he would be the first to do that in the industry. Possibly, his good intentions might have been tamed by the upper company structures. The distaste caused by the tone-deafness is one thing. In general, this line-up was one of the most mediocre collections coming from the designer in a while. The message for this collection, entitled “Exquisite Gucci“, was suits for all, with male and female models wearing versions of the Gucci sartorial two-piece. Alongside this focus on tailoring was a collaboration with Addidas Originals, which saw the sportswear brand’s iconic three stripes splashed over sharp cut suits, on leather gloves and baseball caps, or forming a dramatic V down the front of a corset dress. To be honest, most of the looks felt uninspiring, and I feel like we’ve seen enough of fashion collabs with Adidas in the last couple of years.
Back to really important stuff. If you want to spread awareness or help and support Ukraine, here are some useful links:
Also, big love to independent, small and medium-sized brands like Magda Butrym, Collina Strada and MISBHV that will donate 100% of its profits to aid humanitarian crisis in Ukraine in the following days. Any action counts, big or small!
Design & Culture by Ed 