Just two years ago, Alessandro Michele was an unknown: a back-of-the-house veteran at Gucci—no one’s idea of a revolutionary. But that’s exactly what he’s become, thanks to a blur of colorful, floridly embroidered, eminently wearable clothing. Sometimes it takes decades to become an overnight success.
Gucci has been around, in one form or another, since 1921. Its sales go up. Its sales go down. Right now they’re up 17 percent. They’re “Smells Like Teen Spirit” up. They’re up in the way that every article of clothing made by everyone else is subtly sliding Gucci’s way, trying to get in on the action. You walk into a nice store now, any store, and what had been a reliable display of somber blacks and grays—sturdy, angular, calm clothing—has erupted into Gucci’s newly signature riot of color and appliqué animals, butterflies and snakes and tigers, everything opening its mouth to scream.
This is all thanks to Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s newest creative director. Fashion Week in Milan is where the dream gets reflected back to the dreamer. In the outside world, Michele’s vision exists only in bits and pieces. In fragments. Michelle Obama wears a Gucci map dress on national television; Melania Trump counters with a Gucci pussy-bow crepe de chine blouse. But here, backstage, in a winding former train station on a flat white day in September, it’s all looking back at him: Men in exquisite, high-colored double-breasted suits, trench coats draped louche around their shoulders like elk dangling from the necks of hunter-gatherers. Women in flower-and-bird-appliquéd Gucci jeans, in denim jackets with backs that look like tapestries, in black pleated skirts and fur-lined Gucci snake slippers. A boy in an orange striped jersey, as if he’d been tackled by a tiger. Dakota Johnson in a jacket seamed with studs. A whole mobile menagerie, flashing in pinks and greens: birds, bees, flowers growing ripe.
Michele is standing amid the chaos with a few journalists. His hair is long and tangled, like he’d just climbed down from a stained-glass window. Rings clustering on each finger. He takes off his beautifully embroidered jacket and hands it to an assistant. He gestures at a board in front of him displaying each of the 75 looks he’s about to show. “It’s a way to talk about love,” he says. “Fashion is the most beautiful illusion you can have.” As he talks about his inspirations, I watch a chic journalist from a fashion trade in a black-and-white striped jacket write down the words “Venetian prostitutes.”
His show today is called Magic Lanterns. Someone hands me the notes, and I read the words “sensual panic,” a translation of the French philosopher Roger Caillois. Michele is ostensibly showing women’s looks today, but my eyes, wandering the board, settle on one for men: a black peak-lapel tuxedo, with a big divided bow tie, generous high-cropped pants, white sneakers. Sensual panic is more or less what I feel. Covetousness. Like a twisting pain in my stomach.
“The day that I will not have the chance to run under the beauty, I don’t want to live anymore. Because it’s one of my first reasons to live.
I know this feeling by now, having looked at my share of Michele’s clothing. It’s lovely—and not in the tasteful “zoom in on this exquisite, understated detail” way that a lot of men’s clothing is lovely. His clothes are like the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters. They’re like Jeff Koons sculptures minus the soul-deadening cynicism. They’re bright and generous and on some seductive level suggest that dressing well is easy—just put on this emerald green bomber jacket, this T-shirt with a “Peanuts” character on it, these embroidered jeans with green vines snaking up the sides, and you will somehow look…normal, which is unlikely enough, but also special. Like yourself but better. You will look ready to play Thanksgiving football. But also equipped to escort a beautiful woman to the Met Ball.
Michele’s eye is refined enough for deep luxury and playful enough to avoid the oppressive solemnity that usually comes with it. “I think that there is not really a difference between a ‘Peanuts’ and a beautiful Renaissance painting,” he says to me later. “There is something very romantic in the ‘Peanuts’—it’s at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.”
At his women’s show here in Milan, he’s tinted a big room bordello pink, in honor of the Venetian prostitutes, I guess, and filled it with smoke and 250,000 dangling shards of mirror—romanticism at excessive, fashion-world scale. The show begins with the recorded sound of Florence Welch intoning William Blake. The models, men and women, walk flat-footed like ghosts. Black Victorian stegosaurus gowns pass by. Shirts and pants that look like luxurious wallpaper. Orange furs, sharply geometric skirts, a gothic horror movie made cuddly via embroidered zebras and fringed clown pants.
Afterward, Michele is overrun by people. He’s in the center of the crowd, talking to Demna Gvasalia, designer for Vetements and Balenciaga. He hugs his tall, intense CEO, Marco Bizzarri. He nearly makes out with Dakota Johnson. The scrum becomes an impromptu press conference, reporters shouting at him, him shouting back. Someone asks about all the living things that adorn his clothing, the tigers and bees and birds.
“The beauty is from nature, always,” he says, his voice raised in the middle of the mob. Italian-accented English, awash in sincerity. “Animals is god!”
“I spent all my life hypnotized from the beauty,” Michele says. “Beauty” is maybe the word you hear most from Michele. “I had two different kind of parents. My mother was obsessive with movie stars and cinema and Hollywood because she worked in movies. And my father was obsessed with beauty everywhere—in art, in nature, animals. So I think that it’s something that is in my DNA of my family."
“The day that I will not have the chance to run under the beauty, I don’t want to live anymore,” he says. “Because it’s one of my first reasons to live. I mean, when I am nervous, I try to look at something beautiful. I get in a beautiful place. I try to read something beautiful. I try to read something like a beautiful poem—something that makes me feel better because it's like my religion.”
Fashion designers are sensitive to aesthetics as a rule; their work is to make the outside world look a little more like the inside of their own heads. But many, such as Michele’s most influential predecessor at Gucci, Tom Ford, are also showmen—they have an instinct for performance, a certain savvy understanding of their audiences. They are psychologists, reading unspoken or even unrealized needs and offering up clothing like precisely calibrated prescriptions. Michele’s Gucci—tactile, right-brain, moody—is more atavistic. It feels less like medicine or spectacle and more like a form of faith, with Michele at the head of the church, kneeling alongside the rest of us.
I think that’s why his clothes inspire not just admiration from people who are able to understand the references and the technique, but emotion from people like me, who generally can’t. Even when they’re preposterous—and what is a transparent blue lace men’s shirt embroidered with two sassy parrots if not preposterous?—they’re imbued with a kind of sincere human warmth. Michele is offering up more than simply a worldview, which is seductive enough—he’s offering up himself. “My life—it’s a piece of work,” he says. “And my work is a piece of life.” Tom Hiddleston, who starred in a recent Gucci campaign, put it to me another way: “Alessandro Michele seems to work from a place of total freedom.”
"I mean, I hate that movie. If I can, I wanted to destroy it. It’s like seeing a movie of your ex-relation that was so bad."
This was not always the case; it wasn’t even recently the case. Michele, who was born in Rome and studied costume design at the city’s ancient and prestigious Accademia di Costume e di Moda, was having a charmed enough career—first at Fendi, and then as a junior Tom Ford hire at Gucci—but not one that suggested that he’d ever be entrusted with the job he has now. For almost a decade, he’d labored in the back of the house at Gucci under his predecessor, Frida Giannini. “I tried to survive, to be very professional,” he says now. He was anonymous; even he felt anonymous. There’s a scene in The Director, a 2013 James Franco–produced documentary on Giannini, that hints at the complicated dynamic between Michele and his then boss. “Frida has been part of my life for so long she’s like a sister to me—or a half sister,” Michele tells the filmmakers. But in the next scene, Giannini tells Michele his work is “useless.” She points to a bag: “This one is horrible.” She points to another and says it looks like “a chic Flintstones cell phone.”
“I mean, I hate that movie,” Michele says now. Not necessarily because it’s inaccurate. Because it reminds him of a moment he’d prefer not to relive. “If I can, I wanted to destroy it. It’s like seeing a movie of your ex-relation that was so bad. You don’t want to look—I mean, you are curious just to see how you don’t want to be anymore. That’s it.” Working to realize Giannini’s vision—sleek and sexy and tasteful, in a blunt, straightforward way that did not translate to sales—was hard for Michele; when she was forced out, in 2014, he contemplated quitting Gucci altogether and becoming an interior designer instead. “I didn’t find really a good reason to work anymore in fashion,” he says now.
On what was supposed to be Michele’s way out the door, he had a conversation with Gucci’s current CEO, Marco Bizzarri, who was hunting for Giannini’s successor. “As you can imagine, it was a kind of scientific search,” Bizzarri says. “We went to many names in the industry, advertising, photographers, tried to think out of the box as well. So there was a pretty long list of potential candidates. And I met two of them, actually, before I had the chance to meet Alessandro. Alessandro was not on the list.” Bizzarri had no reason to scout within his own company. He was looking to start over. “I thought there was nobody inside that was able to create the kind of fashion push that I wanted to give.”
It was a courtesy meeting, in other words. But then, Bizzarri says, “something clicked. It was completely not rational. Very much emotional.” He and Michele talked for hours. “He knew everything,” Bizzarri says. The history of the house. The best, boldest possible version of its future. How it all worked. “In a company like Gucci, you can lose millions and millions in a second,” Bizzarri tells me. “It could’ve been much easier for me to appoint someone famous.” But Michele, who was then not at all famous, convinced him otherwise. Bizzarri decided to give him an audition.
Michele was asked to produce a men’s collection in just five days. For inspiration, he looked to his own ostentatiously vintage aesthetic, his deep knowledge of the house, and the energy and frustration born of years of waiting. The details of that moment are lost to Michele now, even as its vividness remains: “Can you try to explain what you felt when you were just one day old? You can’t remember. It’s like you knew about it because everybody tried to explain to you how it was beautiful, but you can’t remember exactly. It was just energy, you know?”
The result, which looked nothing like anything Giannini had been doing, was not quite a hit, but it was an idea—a coherent, entirely novel vision about the way forward. He got the job. “At the beginning, I remember, everyone was like, ‘My God, this person—please give us back Frida,’” Bizzarri says. But a month later, at Gucci’s fall women’s show, Michele introduced the full scope of his fur-lined, brightly colored decadent sensibility. All of a sudden, Bizzarri remembers, “you started seeing in all the magazines the trends, in terms of colors, aesthetics, size, and everything—you see that in every single collection now. There is a kind of change that Alessandro started.”
The most fashionable NBA players wear Gucci now. So do beautiful women on airplanes. Jared Leto took Michele to the Oscars last year, and he wore Gucci pretty much constantly on his Suicide Squad press tour. A day after Michele’s show in Milan, Vogue hosted Gucci Mane, the Atlanta rapper, in its offices and screened for him the show featuring Gucci’s newest collection. He almost fell off the couch when a women’s white mink coat with red lettering came down the runway. “That coat is nasty”—he liked it. “Goodness!” Over the past year, if you’d shopped regularly, you could watch the phenomenon spread—embroidered wildlife ran down the sleeves of Gucci bombers, then just started climbing up the sides of the garments next to them.
Why a brand becomes a sensation is always a fascinating and usually unanswerable question. But the day after the runway show, wandering around Milan’s Gucci flagship, I thought I maybe caught a glimpse. The store, with its window displays of pink neon and red brocade, is the first in Gucci’s empire to be remade entirely by Michele. Inside, burnished steel frames a rain forest’s worth of color. Moroccan and Oriental rugs lie beneath emerald green and crimson suiting, yellow jackets electric with silver threads, outrageously luxurious fur horse-bit loafers done in fabrics that look like they’d survived the Renaissance.
The overall effect was to make an often grim ritual feel slightly more festive. The store was still filled with wealthy internationals shopping in the bored, slightly manic way that rich people shop, tourists swapping Vans for snake sneakers, expensive-looking men and women perusing 3,000-euro jackets without taking off their sunglasses…but they were doing it among orange, magenta, and violet furs, pink tweeds with green butterfly pockets, objects of real heartrending beauty next to sweaters with sassy cats on them.
The contrast at work—between sacred and silly—is vital to whatever it is that is making Gucci work. Michele’s open-mindedness is contagious. Like him, his clothes are attuned to the splendor that resides in plain sight. At their very best, they help teach us how to live as he does: always alert to the possibility of something beautiful.
In each of Michele’s shows so far, he’s shown clothing for both men and women, but the collections have been gendered, in the traditional way of the industry—men’s in January, women’s in February. But next year, for the first time, the house will show the entirety of Gucci’s men’s and women’s looks simultaneously. This is a radical change, and it speaks to how thoroughly Michele has already remade a century-old house in his image. “Some houses can't do it, but Gucci, in terms of the aesthetic, can do it,” Bizzarri says. Michele is probably the most gender-neutral designer currently working. Both of Michele’s previous collections “were much stronger than the normal shows, because they are together, men and women. The kind of impact that you give is much, much stronger.” So Bizzarri and Michele decided to go all in and not separate the clothes at all.
“For me, the company is my big movie, and I don’t want to do a movie for men and a movie for women,” Michele explains, a week after the show in Milan. “They have to live together to make the most beautiful movie.” He’d vanished for a few days, then resurfaced on Instagram video, underneath the open mouth of the Pantheon in Rome. He’d gone to look at another beautiful thing. A few days after that, from his office in Rome, he Facetimes me, rotating his laptop to show me a taxidermied bird above his vintage desk. He is sincere in this way, a bit childlike. “I don’t want to change the market,” he says, about the decision to show the two collections simultaneously. “I understand that it’s something that belongs to me, to my point of view. I don’t want to suggest nothing to the market. It’s just me.”
It’s less a political statement than an aesthetic one, Michele says, brushing his hair back—another step in pursuit of the same idiosyncratic, slightly whimsical notion of beauty that he’s spent his life steeped in. “Sometimes I dress myself or I put jewels on me, just to have fun. You know what I mean? You try to confuse the bad. If you put something beautiful on you and you try to play like a child with crazy things on you, it’s like you forget that you have to die. And death doesn’t recognize you.”
Zach Baron is GQ's staff writer.
This story originally appeared in the December 2016 issue with the title "Gucci's Main Man."
Watch Gucci Mane explain just how Gucci the Spring 2017 season of Gucci truly is:
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