“Fashion is a sort of clock,” Alessando Michele rightly observed this afternoon. And the last five years have been set to Gucci time. Michele’s very first show—of a collection assembled in only five days—was held at the Milan menswear week in January 2015. That day, when we rolled up to the show’s space alongside the Diana Majestic that Gucci’s Frida Giannini had called home for years, all we knew was that she’d left suddenly and “the team” was being led by an in-house accessories designer. At the moment his first look came out—a guy in a red pussy-bow blouse—the share price of Gucci’s owner, the French group Kering, was hovering around 150 euros. Today it is 590 euros. Michele’s kaleidoscopic recontextualization has both transformed the fortunes of Gucci and significantly affected wider fashion.
This afternoon Michele referred back to that first collection—the open-back kangaroo-lined loafers that were his first big accessories hit were among the footwear today (though no longer kangaroo-lined, of course). But this was not self-reference for the sake of it. “I haven’t got any nostalgia,” he said. “I don’t cling to the past.... I use the past because the past is a very interesting space.”
Instead Michele was inviting us to “revise and reconsider” the characteristics of masculinity through an allegorical journey in clothing back to childhood. The middle of this runway was dominated by a huge pendulum that ticktocked back and forth, drawing a line in the sand beneath it. Once the clothes started coming, the pendulum revolved to swing from different angles—a Foucault-inspired demonstration not that the earth rotates, but that our perception of time is nonlinear (especially when the clock you read it by is that of fashion).
Michele has long interrogated conventional masculinity—that first collection was soft power, gender-fluid, pussy-bow’ed, and pretty—and here he continued that conversation not by infantilizing his man, but by inserting pieces from preadolescence. There were knickerbockers, little black leather strap-held school shoes and shape sorter bags, and pulled-up knee socks patterned GG in a manner the Italians call greche and which they send well-washed boys to church in. A baby blue gingham coat and some of the jeans featured the unmistakable green bruising of grass stains: a perennial laundry-day challenge for parents of boys.
Around these swirled many other references plucked and refreshed from multiple time zones. Grannyish bolero hats (we were in an ersatz bullfighting arena) and a prim powder blue day coat, David Bowie-ish metallic flares, Kurt Cobain-ish grungy ’90s denim and oversized knits, and a great Courtney Love-ish leopard-print coat made you suspect that maybe Michele was looking at some of the characters who helped form his own perception of masculinity. Two bags, very Gucci, featured the word fake on one side and not on the other, while T-shirts created with the punk rocker Richard Hell (whom Michele said he first met as a teenager) read “impatience” and “impotence.” (Remember how frustrating it could be to be a kid?)
A puffer, some bags, a pair of shoes, and some cutesy Peter Pan–collared dresses featured classic Liberty-print florals—some of the bags read Liberty too. Michele acknowledged he is a sucker for a floral and added: “And, of course, liberty means freedom, so I decided to be a bit playful with this side—and it is a fantastic store, you go back to your childhood to be in it.”
Michele said this very Met-relevant exercise in time travel was a deconstruction of masculinity through which he hoped to hint at nontoxic alternatives and the positivity of being strange. However, he added: “This is not a narrative that excludes or rules out mainstream masculinity; on the contrary, I want to talk about how complex it is to be a man. And this means growing up maybe in a different way because the world of men is very diverse and full of different elements like the feminine world.”
To an extent Michele was exploring an idea that Stefano Pilati and Miuccia Prada also focused on this season: an emphasis on the potential boundarylessness of masculinity rather than its long-constructed boundaries. It is important territory to mine, and Michele has plans to. “I prefer losing but keeping on betting, because I couldn’t do anything else,” said the man on a five-year winning streak.
