Alessandro Michele makes the past live in the present. You can take that as a very obvious face-value commercial fact: He’s the fashion resurrectionist who resuscitated Gucci with his stupendously successful vintage-retrieving design formula. But there’s something more than that. When you go to his shows, you really feel shadows being spirited up. His Resort show this summer was literally a walk among the dead of the Roman Empire in the Alyscamps necropolis; seeing girls trailing long dresses past fire on that night produced some gulp-making moments. An earlier show revealed his fascination with the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Tonight, Michele took us down to another layer of history: Le Palace in Paris, the hallowed ground of a late, great ’70s and early-’80s club in an old theater in Montmartre. People came here to meet lovers and friends . . . to experience this never-ending night. “Everything is a bit dusty here, a bit abandoned, but beautiful,” he said. “But this place is full of life. The models could have been coming to the nightclub.”
Cue glitter and Lurex and fringe, ostrich-feather showgirl fans, a pair of jeans cut like chaps with chains as suspenders (worn beneath a perfectly straight tweed blazer), a bedazzled jockstrap worn outside white tailored trousers, and a couple of boys in underpants, one of them a pair of Y-fronts in GG-logo canvas. Well, yes, that listing does labor the sybaritic sex club emphasis a bit too much.
Michele’s favorite geeks and nerds had also gotten in—the kind of people he started putting on the men’s runway in 2015. And there were all the extravagant passages of couture-ish dresses with vastly elaborate ’80s shoulder lines you expect from the designer—and a showing of impeccably cut ’70s high-waisted, flared, nipped-torso suits.
Study up on the history of Le Palace and you’ll discover that it was the haunt of Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Kenzo, Antonio Lopez, and all the great women muses of their circles, mixed in with rock stars and anyone from anywhere who looked good enough to the formidable Edwige on the door. Michele thrived on riffing out his homages to Issey Miyake’s stiff fan pleating technique and Yves Saint Laurent’s tailoring. And then, in a frozen pause, he had Jane Birkin—legend of French music, theater, and film—stand up and sing from her song “Baby Alone in Babylone,” the title of which seemed perfectly apt for the hint of morbidity Michele likes to summon, and which so successfully syncs with the Gen Z/millennial taste for getting scared. At the beginning, he had shown an art-house movie, shot in 1970, by Italian experimental theater auteurs Leo de Berardinis and Perla Peragallo. There was grainy footage of a girl having what looked like a terrible trip in a country house, all smeary eye makeup and psychotic gestures. Weirdly, there was a passage where you couldn’t tell whether Michele had inserted his own footage, so similar to Gucci did the girl’s long, sequined, balloon-sleeved dress look. No, he said: “I have only recently come to this movie.”
Weird coincidence, that. This is a designer who rummages around in the past and ends up finding himself there. The past living in the present: There is a global powerhouse of a brand built on Michele’s ability to keep magicking up that fantasia.
