Photographs from Gucci.com, taken on the Gucci Cruise 2016 runway Gucci Cruise 2016 12 the difference in philosophy
overseen the design of an entirely new men’s collection, a foppish conception that was a decisive swerve from the bourgeois luxury of Giannini’s menswear designs (sweaters in muted colors, tasteful cashmere peacoats). Michele’s clothes would have pleased the earliest inhabitants of the Palazzo Alberini: a blouselike pink shirt fastened at the neck with a pussycat bow; mink-lined mules with horse-bit buckles. Michele gave the runway show of the collection a modern edge by presenting the garments on both male and female models. On January 21, 2015, two days after the show, Michele was officially promoted to creative director. That February, he produced his first women’s collection, which was shown on a parade of wan models—some of them slightly funny-looking, many of them in nerdy glasses. The designs, like Michele’s antiques collection, suggested a voracious curatorial eye. One model wore a floral tea gown with furry slippers—a supple combination of thirties débutante and fifties housewife. A transparent peach-colored blouse with a ruffled neckline was boldly paired with a scarlet leather skirt. Michele was offering a startling miscellany inflected with a high-end vintage sensibility. Although he had invented the clothes, it was as if they had been culled from a thrift store to which centuries of Roman princesses had consigned their most extravagant castoffs. The collection was initially greeted with warm, if guarded, curiosity. Vanessa Friedman, the Times critic, wrote, “It wasn’t Fashion, it was fashion; a parade of pieces with a nostalgic romance that could be plucked from a wardrobe, or plunked into one, with ease.” Within a few months, though, the fashion world had fully embraced Michele’s cluttered, retro sensibility. After Gucci’s Cruise collection was shown in New York in the summer of 2015, Nicole Phelps observed, in Vogue, “We all shoot the hell out of it, and, more critically, we want to wear it.” Adrian Joffe, the president of Comme des Garçons and of the high-fashion retail chain Dover Street Market, told me, “The whole spirit of it was a complete revolution, a deep change.” Most designers present a new set of looks each season, with the implication that last season’s clothes have fallen utterly out of style. Michele lightly tweaks his template from season to season. “Alessandro tells a story,” Joffe said. “I love the animal world. Within nature there is always something unexpected and for me I find it a great source of inspiration.” Alessandro Michele, on his inspiration for the Cruise 2016 collection Michele’s clothes are pretty but not overtly sexy. Although they have a youthful verve, he has a preference for long sleeves, high necklines, and below-the-knee skirts of the sort that can also flatter grown women. In the twelve collections that he has presented so far, he has not isolated a single silhouette and made it his signature, nor has he mined a single historical period. Rather, his clothes reflect a broad study of costume and, in particular, of the ways adornment and embellishment have been used over centuries. Instead of making references to the movies or photography—common inspirational recourses for contemporary designers—Michele’s clothes are shaped by the decades he has spent exploring the flea markets, museums, and archives of European cities. A person who visits the eighteenth-century galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London, might pause before one opulent display -- a two-hundred-andeighty-year-old waistcoat in yellow satin, richly embroidered with full-blown flowers and feathered scrolls—and wonder just how long Michele has spent gazing at it, taking notes. Michele’s approach to design can be almost comically cerebral. He has a fondness for issuing explanatory texts for his shows which allude to postmodernist philosophy—a tendency that reveals the influence of his partner, Giovanni Attili, a professor of urban planning who is well versed in critical theory. A note for a recent men’s collection cites Gilles Deleuze’s idea of “assemblage,” observing that Michele’s clothes “become an assemblage of fragments emerging from a temporal elsewhere: resurfacing epiphanies, entangled and unexpected.” Immersed as Michele is in the “temporal elsewhere,” his clothes are firmly aligned with current cultural themes. The actor and model Hari Nef, who is transgender, appeared in the Fall 2016 men’s show. She told me, “There is nothing inherently subversive the difference in philosophy 13
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