ROX MAGAZINE
LUXURY WATCH EDIT
OUT OF THIS
WORLD
Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele has garnered a reputation for creating clothing, jewellery and watches that are unlike anything else. Laura McCreddie-Doak looks at this mercurial magpie’s history and influence.
H
eads as handbags, advertising campaigns featuring Greek gods alongside punks or Hollywood icon Tippi Hendren as a glamorously unsettling fortune teller, watches based on the front section of a skateboard – this is the weird and wonderful world that Alessandro Michele has created at Gucci. In keeping with the creative director’s magpie instincts, it is one that spans centuries, cultures and disciplines taking in everything from the Byzantine-style mosaics and frescoes of Rome’s Basilica di San Clemente and the flamboyant costumes of Bob Mackie who famously made Elton John’s outlandish stage outfits to Mickey Mouse, the graffiti of now-collaborator Gucci Ghost and the works of French literary theorist and noted semiotician Roland Barthes. Speaking to Another magazine back in 2018, he tried to explain how he managed to curate this strange Paradise. “My Gucci universe is inclusive. It fragments to recreate in a contemporary way. It tries to achieve chemical effects through the use of
different agents. It is a possible universe that sometimes uses an impossible language. I like being in this universe because it gives me more possibilities.” Michele, a man from Rome whose father was a technician for Alitalia and whose mother assisted a film executive, started to give free reign to these possibilities back in 2015 when the-then creative director Frida Giannini, with whom Michele worked at Fendi and under whom he was head of accessories, left abruptly. Her unscheduled departure left the newly-promoted Michele and the design team just five days to present a brand-new men’s collection. Described in Vogue’s Runway by Tim Blanks as “looks that will undoubtedly enflame anyone who carries a torch for Gucci’s jet-set legacy”. Gone was the slick, preened wealth of the Giannini era, replaced instead with androgynous models in pussy-bow blouses, brocade coats and grandma knits that could quite easily have been stolen from their girlfriend’s wardrobe. Months later he repeated the magic with his womenswear collection. Every seat had on it
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