Alessandro Michele is an Italian fashion designer. In January 2015, he was appointed creative director of Gucci, the Italian fashion luxury house where he had been working since 2002. Known for his maximalist designs, Alessandro Michele relaunch Gucci’s popularity with a « Geek-Chic » props. He is responsible for all of Gucci's collections and global brand image.
Biography
Early life
Alessandro Michele grew up in Monte Sacro, outside of Rome. His father was an Alitalia technician, and his mother an assistant to a movie executive. In the early 1990s, Alessandro Michele completed his studies of fashion design at the Accademia di Costume e di Moda in Rome, where he learned to design both theatrical costumes and fashion wear.
Career
In 1994, Alessandro Michele left Rome to work in Les Copains, an Italian knitwear firm based in Bologna. Three years later, he joined Silvia Venturini Fendi and Karl Lagerfeld at luxury house Fendi. He worked with Frida Giannini and was appointed senior accessories designer, in charge of the brand’s leather goods. In 2002, Tom Ford, Gucci’s creative director from 1994 to 2004, noticed of Alessandro Michele’s designs and invited him to work at the firm’s London-based design office. He was originally in charge of the company’s handbag designs. In 2006, Alessandro Michele was named senior designer of Gucci leather goods, and in 2011, he was promoted associate creative director to Frida Giannini, creative director of Gucci since 2005. In 2014, the Italian designer also became creative director of Richard Ginori, the Florentine porcelain brand acquired by Gucci in June 2013.
In January 2015, Marco Bizzarri asked Alessandro Michele to act as interim creative designer for the January menswear show, giving him a week to reshape Frida Giannini’s original designs. Michele accepted the challenge and introduced a “new Gucci: nonconformist, romantic, intellectual”. Two days later, Kering appointed Alessandro Michele creative director of Gucci, with the goal to reinvent Gucci’s props amid deflating sales. A month later, Michele introduced a “sophisticated, intellectual and androgynous feel” for Gucci during his first women’s collection show. Alessandro Michele reintroduced Gucci classics like the double-G logo and created iconic products such as the Dionysus handbag. He moved away from Tom Ford's "Sexy Gucci" props and feminized Gucci’s menswear. He reused the “My Body My Choice” slogan, the embroidered uterus design, and the “22.05.1978” date, transforming the brand into a postgender proposition. He added a dramatic Renaissance component to Gucci’s spirit, replaced the modernist furniture of the Palazzo Alberini-Cicciaporci with antiques, and choosed buildings of historic significance for his theatrical shows. In 2016, for the Gucci Museum in Florence, Alessandro Michele curated two additional rooms dedicated to Tom Ford’s collections. Since the 2018 opening of the Gucci Wooster Bookstore in New York, Michele seasonally contributes to the curation of the shop’s items. In October 2018, he co-curated with Maurizio Cattelan the 2-month Gucci art exhibition Art is Present in Shanghai. In 2019, Alessandro Michele revived Gucci’s makeup collection, and Gucci launched its first fine jewelry collection, which he designed.
Work
Alessandro Michele’s father was also an avid artist who often took his son out to the museums. His family encouraged his interest in fashion at an early age. He always had long hair. Teenager, he read British magazines and was a fan of London’s post-punk and New Romanticstreet style. His designs have been described as eclectic, flamboyant and maximalist, almost psychedelic, and drawn from several influences that span from cinema and theatrics to post-punk, crochet and glamour. Alessandro Michele refers to himself as an art archaeologist - historicist of garments - rather than a creative director, considering that clothes are meaningless without a historic context. In his fashion Renaissance process, he explores how adornment and embellishment was used over the centuries, bringing a kaleidoscopic mix of times and cultures that resonates with Gilles Deleuze's idea of "assemblage". Alessandro Michele is the mannequin of his own creations - Christ-like beard with long dark hair, knee socks made of thick wool with sandals, mourning rings on his fingers - and believes that fashion helps individuals storify their existence. For Michele, fashion shows are “a procession of epiphanies and expanded thoughts that settle into a different partition of the sensible”. In his shows, the runway models hand-carried an exact replica of their head and the backstage was turned inside out for a behind-the-scenes scenography. Deeply influenced by Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s perception of beauty, Michele envisions fashion as imprisoned in the vicious cycle of profitability, but portraits himself as a nouveau siècle fashion liberator. To him, the more a product is special, the more it will sell. Luxury is a matter of singularity, not price: "if you have something for you, it's just for you. This is what it means to be rich."
