A WONDERFUL WORLD

Gucci’s series of endless births over the last century embody and embrace an interdisciplinary understanding of gender and identity where everything connects to anything.

By MAX BERLINGER


At 100 years old, Gucci is not just surviving amid a time of unprecedented change, but thriving. The internet, social media, the aftermath of the pandemic, and widespread sociopolitical growing pains are just some of the sweeping events that have upended the fashion business over the past two years. And yet Gucci has chugged along, creating beauty and desire for generation after generation. As the brand reaches this important milestone, its powers to intoxicate consumers may well be at their peak.  

Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s exuberant creative director since 2015, has redefined the look of the Italian label, injecting it with a maximalist eccentricity. Today, the brand is known for its nerdy-chic, gender-fluid, and poetic look, full of romantic blouses, logo-strewn sportswear, and sexy, 1970s inspired tailoring. His collections have become sprawling sartorial universes, that offer goodies for any style archetype. Granny chic, sylphlike tailoring, flashy sportswear, restrained elegance – it’s all there for the picking. It’s not dogmatic, but mutable, in line with the way that Gen Z has embraced a fluid approach to fashion, gender, and life. Michele’s Gucci unapologetically embraces the notion that identity is not a static construct - it is dynamic and contextual. It says that there is a Gucci for every type of person in the world, that there is a place for everyone in its tribe.

As American journalist Frank Bruni succinctly puts it, “Michele’s Gucci is engaged in a consistently spirited and occasionally profound conversation with the zeitgeist, drawing from it, adding to it and revolutionizing fashion in the process. Young consumers plant their flags and sculpt their images on social media, so Gucci, under Michele, does too. They expand and even explode the old parameters around gender, sexual identity, race and nationality, and Michele takes that journey with them, even leads them on it, giving them a uniform for it, a visual vocabulary with which to express it. The emotional genius of what he has done is to affirm their searching.”

Gucci was originally founded in Florence as a luggage shop, by the enterprising Guccio Gucci. His store sold imported travel bags but, crucially, had its own workshop onsite that made custom luggage. Eventually that business became the core of the Gucci empire. Under Guccio’s son Aldo, the brand’s reach expanded, becoming an empire known across the world. A string of hit products – the Bamboo bag, its signature loafers, the “Jackie” bag and its Flora scarf – made Gucci a go-to for the fashion cognoscenti, and provided a design foundation that remains central to the brand. These items are reinterpreted again and again and remain part of the current roster of covetable products. The brand opened stores internationally and became part of the firmament of luxury brands.

During the 1980s, contentious family drama played out behind-the-scenes as the brand continued to flourish, but it was during the 1990s that the brand’s superstar status was cemented by the designer Tom Ford. Ford, a stealthy American, brought an unabashed, swaggering sensuality to the label. Later, the Italian designer Frida Giannini added a more feminine, romantic touch, and after she left, Michele, who worked under her, was promoted. He put an immediate maximalist stamp on the brand, blending Ford’s sensuality and Giannini’s romance, but adding an over-the-top, eccentric sense of Italian rococo. Today, the brand is for those who value individuality, and embrace fashion as a means of expressing their strangest, most outlandish desires.

“Going through the hour when everything originated is a great responsibility for me, and a joyful privilege,” Michele said in his typically florid style. “It means being able to open the locks of history and linger over the edge of the beginning. It means soaking in that natal source to relive the dawn and the coming into view.”

“The whole spirit of it was a complete revolution, a deep change.” Adrian Joffe, the president of Comme des Garçons and the store Dover Street Market, said of Michele’s revolution. “Alessandro tells a story.” 

Michele’s story is often inspired by Italian culture and history, like a Renaissance painting and dreamy poetry. But in his work you can see a sponge-like brain that pulls from everything – pop culture, theatre, film, music, events from the recent past or from eons ago. Michele is known in the fashion world as a sort of philosopher of clothing, someone who ruminates deeply on what we wear and what it all means. “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. 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.”

Under his watch, the brand has exploded – it’s seen in magazines, on red carpets, and, perhaps most importantly, on regular people wishing to communicate some secret part of themselves to the world. It has experienced its own Renaissance of sorts, one that perfectly dovetails with the brand's big anniversary. “I wouldn’t like to sentimentalize a biography though,” Michele said. “Gucci’s long history can’t be contained within a single inaugural act. As any other existence, its destiny is marked by a long series of endless births and constant regenerations. In this persistent movement, life challenges the mystery of death. In this hunger for birth, we have learnt how to dwell the time.” 

He added, “I felt like celebrating 100 years of Gucci, which is not only fashion, it’s the essence of fashion, it’s life and its great strength is being so popular. Gucci is a film, a song, a world, a character from a movie, a pop star.”

That’s not typical talk from a designer, but it does reveal a bit about why Michele’s work is so powerful, and so popular. Beyond the glitz and glamour, there’s a certain elegiac ache, a nostalgia, and a little bit of sadness. While most designers traffic in sex and glamour, there’s something so potent about garments that, together, conjure a wide spectrum of human emotions, as Michele does. Michele’s work isn’t two-dimensional, but represents the complexities and contradictions of life. Perhaps the most impressive feat that Michele executes is to stuff his collections with many references and inspirations, but never allow the looks to be weighed down under them. “In my work, I caress the roots of the past to create unexpected inflorescences, carving the matter through grafting and pruning,” he explains. “I appeal to such ability to reinhabit what has already been given. And to the blending, the transitions, the fractures, the concatenations. To escape the reactionary cages of purity, I pursue a poetics of the illegitimate.”

That takes a sharp mind, a light touch, and a bit of dazzling genius. These are things Michele has proven to be collection after collection. “An alchemical factory of contaminations where everything connects to anything,” as Michele describes it in his own words.

Even 100 years on, Michele still sees the brand as “an infant that is constantly reborn and recreated. It’s incredible how Gucci has gone through multiple lives and continues to be so popular.” Gucci’s “natural rebirth”, according to Michele, is “a sign that fashion is not finished and will never finish - independently of any fashion week. Fashion is a representation of life and can self manage.”

But as Michele reminds us, “The promise of a never-ending birth is only renewed through an evolving capacity.”