Sarah Mower
September 23, 2015
The incoming march of a new generation in Italy has begun, and the fashion world finds itself standing back spectating on the sudden arrival of a multicolored, sparkly, life-affirming parade. Alessandro Michele is in the spotlight as the Pied Piper of change—a risk-taker and revolutionary who has not so much wiped the slate clean at Gucci as doodled all over it, colored it in, stuck sequins on it, and tied it up with a grosgrain bow. His Spring lineup was a very much amplified, filled-in, decorated, and dazzling accessorized extension of the girly, geeky, vintage-like collection that he launched last season in the incongruously dark nightclubby surroundings of the show space the company had been using since the ’90s, when Tom Ford was grooving the disco ’70s at the brand. As Michele said backstage, surrounded by a visual kaleidoscope of glittery, flower-embroidered satin, chiffon, Lurex knits, brocades, and trimmings, “It’s a big trip! Of course I am interested in personal style and quirkiness. There are things here that look vintage, but don’t really exist as vintage—it’s the illusion of it. I’m not nostalgic! I’d like to shake it up again.”
Michele is having none of the slick Gucci aesthetic that descended down through the tenure of his predecessor and former boss, Frida Giannini. This time, he led his army of Gucci girls into the open air and constructed an aristo-domestic set, with a printed carpet against the backdrop of a disused train depot—a plot of broken-down, old industrial Milan which, if we are to be romantic about it, seemed something like a metaphor for Italian regeneration.
