In this costume-drama context, Michele’s vision looked more familiar, if hardly less peculiar. A pleated blue silk skirt, patterned with flowers, was paired with a boxy jacket in the same fabric; the jacket was edged with blue-and-green grosgrain ribbon, and a bow in the shape of a chrysanthemum was pinned at the neck. A long skirt in paisley-patterned silk was worn with a jacquard bomber jacket and spiky metallic-blue ankle boots. There was a profusion of accessorizing: handbags, eyeglasses, jewelry. More than one model wore a silk scarf tied over her hair and under her chin—a practical style sometimes favored by the Queen. For all the inspiration that Michele had taken from English style, the collection did not look especially British—though a slouchy Union Jack-patterned sweater was a clear homage to Vivienne Westwood, the British designer known for translating native English eccentricity into high fashion. Michele’s show was a fantasia that drew on ideas of Britishness while exploiting Italian luxury and craftsmanship. Occasionally, it seemed that his purpose was to render the models ridiculous, such as when he sent out some in platform sneakers with the kind of rainbow-colored soles that club kids wore in the nineties. At other moments, the plethora of bows, beads, and embroideries was irresistibly silly. Christina Binkley, of the Wall Street Journal, cheekily tweeted, “do it yourself @gucci resort17: Take your 6th grade togs, add iron-on heart and animal patches from @Etsy.” Though one could mock all the frippery, the show was disconcertingly lovely. Many outfits were covetable for their curiousness, like objects in a Wunderkammer. There were gasps when a model walked down the passageway in a full-length mink coat inset with coiling snakes: mink cutouts that had been dyed red, black, and white. The seductiveness of Michele’s vision was signalled by a barely subdued clamor among the guests over the emerald seat cushions, which were to be taken home as gifts. Several guests attempted surreptitiously to switch the cat or rabbit they had been assigned for a more desirable snake. The day after the show, I met Michele in a suite at the Savoy Hotel—the young Guccio Gucci’s training ground in luxury. Michele had retired in the early hours of the morning, having been up late dancing at a party held at 106 Piccadilly, a Georgian home that had once been a private club. Annie Lennox had made a surprise appearance, playing the piano. Michele was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, his hair flowing over his shoulders. In his ring-loaded fingers, he was clutching an iPhone case in the shape of a dragon—a gift from a fashion correspondent from Singapore, who had been using it for his own phone until Michele’s magpie eye alighted upon it during the interview. “I am too old for this,” Michele said of the phone case. “But today I am sure I will be happy to go around the city with it.” He had work to do—the men’s ready-to-wear show would take place in a few weeks—but he hoped to steal some time to go to his favorite antique store, near Bond Street. “I bought this there,” he said, extending his hand to point out an English funeral ring. It was backed by woven human hair and bore a tiny image of a skeleton holding what looked like a telescope. On the inside of the ring was a date: February, 1695. The person commemorated by the ring, Michele speculated, “was a soldier, or a sailor.” He asked me, “Is it not beautiful? I love that the English celebrate death.” Michele owns dozens of funeral rings, and he has posted images of some of them on Instagram. His private collections have become part of his public reimagining of Gucci. He told me that he did not regret the loss of privacy. “I feel that, as an artist, the big point is to share, and to let people think about what you are showing,” he said. “Sharing isn’t anything that scares me. My house, my life, my way to live, for me is kind of a masterpiece.” As he went on, his observations sounded more and more like those of his father: “I take care about what I put in my life, because life is an illusion, you know. It’s real that we are on the Earth, but we don’t know for how long. The idea of tomorrow is an illusion. So I want to put this kind of illusion into my life.” Michele grasped for the right word in English to explain himself. “How do you say illudere? To ‘illuse’ myself ? To make an illusion for myself ?” I replied that the closest word in English was “delusion,” but noted that it had negative connotations. Michele was surprised. “In Italian, we can say that beauty is something that you create—that you create the illusion of your life,” he said. “It is to believe in something that doesn’t exist, like a magician, or a wizard.” He went on, “I was thinking over the past few days that the purpose of fashion is to give an illusion. I think that everybody can create their masterpiece, if you build your life how you want it. Just to create that illusion of your life—this is beautiful.” Photographs from Gucci.com, Cruise 2017, Gucci Garden 24 the difference in philosophy
Images from Gucci.com, from the Cruise 2017 collection. A heart and snake on GG motif bags, a watch featuring a golden bee on the dial, and the Princetown slippers with embroidered tigers—just some of the curated tokens from the Gucci Gift catalogue, shot in the lush Ninfa Garden, located in Cisterna di Latina, near Rome with a cast of animals from the Gucci Garden including a tiger, rabbits, turtles and a horse.
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