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US Vogue July 2015
House on Fire
Photographer: Jamie Hawkesworth
Stylist: Camilla Nickerson
Models: Alessandro Michele, Tami Williams & Mica Argañaraz
Make-Up: Lisa Butler
Hair: Tomohiro Ohashi
vogue.com via Melancholybaby
House on Fire
Photographer: Jamie Hawkesworth
Stylist: Camilla Nickerson
Models: Alessandro Michele, Tami Williams & Mica Argañaraz
Make-Up: Lisa Butler
Hair: Tomohiro Ohashi
vogue.com via Melancholybaby
vogue.comInside the House of Gucci: Meet the New Creative Director
Gucci’s new creative director, the unknown Alessandro Michele, is a lot like the woman he champions: daring, curiously compelling—and with a streak of mystery and eccentricity.
by Hamish Bowles
When Alessandro Michele was appointed the new creative director of Gucci at the beginning of this year, the fashion firmament expressed a certain surprise at the positioning of a relative unknown at the helm of the storied billion-dollar Italian luxury brand. No one, however, was more surprised than the 42-year-old Michele himself. With the quirky, long-haired looks of a Merovingian king and a personal style that runs to flower-sprigged Lisa Corti hippie blouses, neckerchiefs that he scissors from lengths of Indian silks, and fistfuls of antique rings, Michele could not be further removed from the sleekly controlled understatement of his predecessor Frida Giannini, who left the company abruptly in January with her partner, then–Gucci CEO Patrizio di Marco.
“I wasn’t even on the list,” Michele says, referring to the presumed roster of high-profile industry talents whose names had been bandied about for the coveted job.
Di Marco’s replacement, Marco Bizzarri (who had earlier doubled Bottega Veneta’s revenue under his progressive leadership within the Kering Group), instead chose one of Gucci’s battalion of behind-the-scenes designers—Michele had joined Gucci in 2002, initially working in London with Tom Ford.
“Fashion is about creating emotion—it’s not necessarily rational,” explains Bizzarri, whose first scheduled hour-long meeting with Michele—at the designer’s apartment—segued into three hours discussing the future of the brand. “I thought, Why should I look for someone else when he can translate the heritage—and when the values of Gucci are in his veins?”
Giannini left before her fall 2015 menswear presentation, which was apparently runway-ready, and so Michele hit the ground running: It was said that he had only a week to create a replacement men’s collection. “It’s not exactly true,” Michele tells me with a wry smile. “It was five days.” His fall 2015 womenswear collection, meanwhile, was to be presented a month later.
Starting at 9:00 a.m. every day, the newly installed creative director worked intensively with his menswear designers; at 8:00 p.m., he joined the womenswear team. “It’s when I understood what a big company it was,” says Michele, who now counts some 70 designers on his staff. In short order, samples were made and fabrics sourced or created. Michele pulled treasured vintage pieces from his wardrobe to use as inspirational starting points, and many prints were taken from antique textiles in his own collection—not only the lengths of fabric assembled from frequent forays to antiques shops and markets around the world but even his carpets and fragments of his upholstery—all “to put together that kind of garden,” as he expresses it. (Later he used the nineteenth-century rose-printed red toile that cushions the bed for his Boston terriers, Bosco and Orso—a crib repurposed from an Indian palanquin—as the unexpected lining of Gucci bags clasped with bridle motifs.)
Michele admits to obsessing about the collections “every single minute.” He went to see Birdman, for instance, “but I wasn’t looking at the film,” he says, laughing. Instead he fixated on a certain striking red-painted corridor in the movie, which soon translated into the women’s collection’s urban set, with its industrial-metal floor and walls paved in black and white subway tiles and painted an oxblood red—a set that Michele peopled with wan, gender-unspecific young people, each of them dressed to suit their individual looks. (Unusually, he styles his shows himself.) The men’s show featured crepe-de-Chine blouses with pussycat bows at the neck, or long-sleeved tees in a coral-red lace worn with shrunken jackets and duffle coats with sleeves cut to bracelet length. The berets and horn-rimmed glasses of a comic-book Left Bank intellectual, the patterned scarves twisted at the neck, and the hands clustered with rings, meanwhile, all evoked elements of Michele himself. (When we meet in Rome a couple of months after the show, where Michele is busy working on his 2016 resort collection, he is wearing no fewer than eleven rings—some stacked three to a finger—including a Deco platinum-and-sapphire example; a Georgian cabochon emerald; a carved pink stone skull from Codognato in Venice; a ruby-eyed Victorian snake; a new Gucci design; and a nun’s ring banded with tiny nodules, each one signifying a different prayer.)
In a subtle homage, he used Abel Korzeniowski’s haunting theme music from A Single Man—Ford’s directorial debut—as his sound track. His time with Ford was “a beautiful experience,” he says. “Tom has a quality like a movie superstar. And I love his vision of that beautiful, Halston-style seventies American woman.”
Michele’s own debut could hardly have been a more emphatic distancing from Giannini. “We are really such different people,” he says. “Night and day. I am trying to cause a little revolution inside the company—to push another language, a different way to talk about beauty and sexiness, which is an old word. It’s about sensuality now. When I started the first collection, I was thinking not in terms of fashion but in terms of attitude,” he adds, “that sense of beauty which I tried to find for an old and beautiful and charming brand like Gucci.”
The garrulous and engagingly unprocessed Michele is still wreathed in wonderment at his new role. Of Bizzarri he says, “He gives me the space to do what I want to do. I have to say that he is crazy—he said, ‘Do whatever you want. Don’t care about the money.’ I risk a lot, too,” he adds,
“because I destroyed everything.”
This was certainly no seamless aesthetic transition: Michele entirely redefined what Gucci could represent, working in the very contemporary idiom of eclectically mismatched separates with a quirky vintage flavor, along with precious accessories that he likens to the relics of saints.
“It’s not easy to live now,” he says. “I think we need to dream. So I wanted to present an idea of something romantic, in dream time—like in a movie.” He is also enjoying working with what he describes as “the Pop symbols of the company”—elements like the double-G logo and the company’s trademark striped athletic ribbing.
Michele’s mother was the first assistant to an executive at Rank films, a British company with studios in Rome. “A supercrazy lady, from this superstylish movie world,” as he remembers her. “There is something eccentric about people like her that we miss today, so I built my fashion show around the idea of individuality. The way you dress is really the way you feel, the way you live, what you read, your choices. That’s what I want to put into Gucci.”
His father, in contrast, was “a bit of a shaman, with long hair and a beard.” Michele has a collection of the walking sticks that his father carved with naturalistic symbols and poetic phrases. “He was a very simple man, but very powerful—he could identify the sound of each different bird; he would whistle the sounds and they would come, so I had the idea he was like Saint Francis. The only dream I have in my life is to be a little piece of my dad, because he was really happy.”
The flora and fauna motifs, along with the sense of handicraft that Michele tries to weave into all his collections, recall not just his father’s hippie magic but other aspects of his childhood, as when his aunt taught him to crochet in an effort to focus his wayward childish energies. “I still love to work with my hands,” he says, admitting that now he picks up new stitches on YouTube and, when in London, makes pilgrimages to Liberty, the fabled department store, to buy needlepoint kits.
The Gucci design team has recently led a peripatetic life. Ford centered it in London, where he lives, while Giannini moved operations to Florence (birthplace of Guccio Gucci, who founded the company in 1921)—and much of the business side is based in Milan, where the company is in the process of relocating to a Mussolini-era aircraft hangar where Michele will stage his collections. Michele, though, prefers Rome. “There is something about the culture of the fifties and the cinema,” he says of his hometown. “But I also need to travel. I need to go to London. You have everything there—present, past, future, exhibitions, theater. And real eccentricity is still very much alive with the English—the kids in the East End, beautiful English old ladies.” He also loves contemporary Los Angeles dressing (“the way they put things together—it’s not chic, but it’s inspiring”) and New York, where he shops vintage stores and where he will present his 2016 resort collection—“a couture show in a garage,” as he explains. “I love couture, but the other side of me loves the street, and I think the mix of these two can create something new. When I go to New York and London, I love to see how very brave the young people are—they have no rules. Even the superchic ladies of the past, like Princess Irene Galitzine, had supermodern attitudes. Today they’d all be into street style.”