DifferentMagazine

Photographs from Gucci.com, Spring Summer 2016
“I’m obsessed with decoration,
orientalism, and
codes that belong to other
cultures, remixing them
and redesigning them the
way I like.”
Alessandro Michele, on the Spring Summer 2016 collection
about a robin’s-egg-blue blouse with a black
grosgrain ribbon that you tie in the front—but,
when you put it on a skinny teen-age boy, there
is something really sinister about that, and punk
about that.” She went on, “Alessandro is placing
these priceless garments that you can’t argue with
in a very radical context. You are going home
with this coat that you want to wear, and your
mom wants to wear, and your grandma wants to
wear—but that coat was shown on a boy, or it has
a giant green snake on the back, and the inner
lining of it is blood red. It is a little nasty and it is
grotesque, but it’s beautiful.”
When I visited Rome, Michele was preparing this
year’s Cruise collection, which was to be shown
later in the spring, in London. In an alcove above
his office desk, he had propped one of the inspirations
for the collection: a small English painting,
from the early seventeenth century, of a youthful
figure of indeterminate gender, dressed in a ruff
collar and a tomato-red jacket ornamented with
gold stitching and buttons. The youth’s face was
realistically rendered but the body was stylized,
with awkwardly braced elbows. The figure held
a prayer book that looked remarkably like an
iPhone.
“It is a young guy who looks like a girl, because,
at that time, until you were older, you were com-
14 the difference in philosophy