He bowed east, to Gucci’s Asian following, using Japanese paper parasols, and references to 17th- and 18th-century chinoiserie.
All the complexity he marshals at Gucci ultimately ends up as straightforward, commercially attractive clothes and accessories, intelligible Italian luxury desirable the world over. He likes to throw things off, here and there-this time, by encasing some looks in sparkling crystal bodysuits, faces and all. The strands of Michele’s taste for surreal, occult-tinged symbolism are hard to fathom. Around they walked, completely enclosed in their own artificial environment, something oddly reminiscent of a piece of ’70s airport design.īehind them was a giant set of a black pyramid, topped with a weather vane. Instead, the show took place encased in a tubular steel-girdered walkway, the models (or what shall we call them-the Gucci tribe?) separated from the audience by plexiglass. The stylized nature embroideries, flower prints taken from Gucci scarf-print archives, and images of butterflies and moths on bags and sweaters could have looked straightforwardly sweet and charming in the open air and daylight.
Michele habitually casts a subliminally strange, uneasy aura over all this when he comes to present it, always finding a dramatic device that puts some kind of film or filter between his audience and the show. It’s funny, I think the era of ‘models’ is ended.”
“I don’t care about models I care about faces!” he declared. The cast of Michele’s “real” types has succeeded in rebooting the fortunes of Gucci. Around a corner was a poly board pinned with photographs of the tribe of unconventional-looking young people who had come together to wear the outfits-geeky boys, girls with shaved heads, and wildly flicked and structured ’80s hairdos, various glasses-wearers. On the sides were hand-scrawled words written by the artist Coco Capitán: “What will we do with all this future,’’ read one phrase. The boxes themselves were printed with Dutch Old Master pictures of parrot tulips cascading from vases, with iPhone charger leads Photoshopped in. If you’re doing that, you don’t reflect, and in these times we need to reflect more.”Įach outfit, sans models, was an exhibition in itself, with its own decorated box for shoes, bags, and jewelry standing at the ready. “We need to let the world not go so fast. He feels it’s wrong to have to “tell a new little story” every season, he said. I want to swim in my ocean,” he said, wearing a yellow Gucci-logo T-shirt and a pale baseball cap as he showed people around. On the contrary, he finds it easier to focus when both sexes are considered together. (Wait! More of them in a minute.) Michele wasn’t making any claims that his first amalgamated female/male collection show for Gucci was a bolt from the blue, a revolutionary turn against the last season. “I’m trying to follow my rules, not fashion rules,” he reasoned, pacing serenely between the aisles of racks on which the Fall collection was poised to be worn by roughly 120 girls and boys. Does it seem wrong to review the Gucci show from backstage? Well, whatever, Alessandro Michele surely won’t mind.
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