Alessandro Michele - Designer, Creative Director of Valentino

[Marc10]

US Vogue July 2015
House on Fire
Photographer: Jamie Hawkesworth
Stylist: Camilla Nickerson
Models: Alessandro Michele, Tami Williams & Mica Argañaraz
Make-Up: Lisa Butler
Hair: Tomohiro Ohashi


vogue.com via Melancholybaby

Inside the House of Gucci: Meet the New Creative Director
Gucci’s new creative director, the unknown Alessandro Michele, is a lot like the woman he champions: daring, curiously compelling—and with a streak of mystery and eccentricity.
by Hamish Bowles

When Alessandro Michele was appointed the new creative director of Gucci at the beginning of this year, the fashion firmament expressed a certain surprise at the positioning of a relative unknown at the helm of the storied billion-dollar Italian luxury brand. No one, however, was more surprised than the 42-year-old Michele himself. With the quirky, long-haired looks of a Merovingian king and a personal style that runs to flower-sprigged Lisa Corti hippie blouses, neckerchiefs that he scissors from lengths of Indian silks, and fistfuls of antique rings, Michele could not be further removed from the sleekly controlled understatement of his predecessor Frida Giannini, who left the company abruptly in January with her partner, then–Gucci CEO Patrizio di Marco.

“I wasn’t even on the list,” Michele says, referring to the presumed roster of high-profile industry talents whose names had been bandied about for the coveted job.

Di Marco’s replacement, Marco Bizzarri (who had earlier doubled Bottega Veneta’s revenue under his progressive leadership within the Kering Group), instead chose one of Gucci’s battalion of behind-the-scenes designers—Michele had joined Gucci in 2002, initially working in London with Tom Ford.

“Fashion is about creating emotion—it’s not necessarily rational,” explains Bizzarri, whose first scheduled hour-long meeting with Michele—at the designer’s apartment—segued into three hours discussing the future of the brand. “I thought, Why should I look for someone else when he can translate the heritage—and when the values of Gucci are in his veins?”

Giannini left before her fall 2015 menswear presentation, which was apparently runway-ready, and so Michele hit the ground running: It was said that he had only a week to create a replacement men’s collection. “It’s not exactly true,” Michele tells me with a wry smile. “It was five days.” His fall 2015 womenswear collection, meanwhile, was to be presented a month later.

Starting at 9:00 a.m. every day, the newly installed creative director worked intensively with his menswear designers; at 8:00 p.m., he joined the womenswear team. “It’s when I understood what a big company it was,” says Michele, who now counts some 70 designers on his staff. In short order, samples were made and fabrics sourced or created. Michele pulled treasured vintage pieces from his wardrobe to use as inspirational starting points, and many prints were taken from antique textiles in his own collection—not only the lengths of fabric assembled from frequent forays to antiques shops and markets around the world but even his carpets and fragments of his upholstery—all “to put together that kind of garden,” as he expresses it. (Later he used the nineteenth-century rose-printed red toile that cushions the bed for his Boston terriers, Bosco and Orso—a crib repurposed from an Indian palanquin—as the unexpected lining of Gucci bags clasped with bridle motifs.)

Michele admits to obsessing about the collections “every single minute.” He went to see Birdman, for instance, “but I wasn’t looking at the film,” he says, laughing. Instead he fixated on a certain striking red-painted corridor in the movie, which soon translated into the women’s collection’s urban set, with its industrial-metal floor and walls paved in black and white subway tiles and painted an oxblood red—a set that Michele peopled with wan, gender-unspecific young people, each of them dressed to suit their individual looks. (Unusually, he styles his shows himself.) The men’s show featured crepe-de-Chine blouses with pussycat bows at the neck, or long-sleeved tees in a coral-red lace worn with shrunken jackets and duffle coats with sleeves cut to bracelet length. The berets and horn-rimmed glasses of a comic-book Left Bank intellectual, the patterned scarves twisted at the neck, and the hands clustered with rings, meanwhile, all evoked elements of Michele himself. (When we meet in Rome a couple of months after the show, where Michele is busy working on his 2016 resort collection, he is wearing no fewer than eleven rings—some stacked three to a finger—including a Deco platinum-and-sapphire example; a Georgian cabochon emerald; a carved pink stone skull from Codognato in Venice; a ruby-eyed Victorian snake; a new Gucci design; and a nun’s ring banded with tiny nodules, each one signifying a different prayer.)

In a subtle homage, he used Abel Korzeniowski’s haunting theme music from A Single Man—Ford’s directorial debut—as his sound track. His time with Ford was “a beautiful experience,” he says. “Tom has a quality like a movie superstar. And I love his vision of that beautiful, Halston-style seventies American woman.”

Michele’s own debut could hardly have been a more emphatic distancing from Giannini. “We are really such different people,” he says. “Night and day. I am trying to cause a little revolution inside the company—to push another language, a different way to talk about beauty and sexiness, which is an old word. It’s about sensuality now. When I started the first collection, I was thinking not in terms of fashion but in terms of attitude,” he adds, “that sense of beauty which I tried to find for an old and beautiful and charming brand like Gucci.”

The garrulous and engagingly unprocessed Michele is still wreathed in wonderment at his new role. Of Bizzarri he says, “He gives me the space to do what I want to do. I have to say that he is crazy—he said, ‘Do whatever you want. Don’t care about the money.’ I risk a lot, too,” he adds,
“because I destroyed everything.”

This was certainly no seamless aesthetic transition: Michele entirely redefined what Gucci could represent, working in the very contemporary idiom of eclectically mismatched separates with a quirky vintage flavor, along with precious accessories that he likens to the relics of saints.

“It’s not easy to live now,” he says. “I think we need to dream. So I wanted to present an idea of something romantic, in dream time—like in a movie.” He is also enjoying working with what he describes as “the Pop symbols of the company”—elements like the double-G logo and the company’s trademark striped athletic ribbing.

Michele’s mother was the first assistant to an executive at Rank films, a British company with studios in Rome. “A supercrazy lady, from this superstylish movie world,” as he remembers her. “There is something eccentric about people like her that we miss today, so I built my fashion show around the idea of individuality. The way you dress is really the way you feel, the way you live, what you read, your choices. That’s what I want to put into Gucci.”

His father, in contrast, was “a bit of a shaman, with long hair and a beard.” Michele has a collection of the walking sticks that his father carved with naturalistic symbols and poetic phrases. “He was a very simple man, but very powerful—he could identify the sound of each different bird; he would whistle the sounds and they would come, so I had the idea he was like Saint Francis. The only dream I have in my life is to be a little piece of my dad, because he was really happy.”

The flora and fauna motifs, along with the sense of handicraft that Michele tries to weave into all his collections, recall not just his father’s hippie magic but other aspects of his childhood, as when his aunt taught him to crochet in an effort to focus his wayward childish energies. “I still love to work with my hands,” he says, admitting that now he picks up new stitches on YouTube and, when in London, makes pilgrimages to Liberty, the fabled department store, to buy needlepoint kits.

The Gucci design team has recently led a peripatetic life. Ford centered it in London, where he lives, while Giannini moved operations to Florence (birthplace of Guccio Gucci, who founded the company in 1921)—and much of the business side is based in Milan, where the company is in the process of relocating to a Mussolini-era aircraft hangar where Michele will stage his collections. Michele, though, prefers Rome. “There is something about the culture of the fifties and the cinema,” he says of his hometown. “But I also need to travel. I need to go to London. You have everything there—present, past, future, exhibitions, theater. And real eccentricity is still very much alive with the English—the kids in the East End, beautiful English old ladies.” He also loves contemporary Los Angeles dressing (“the way they put things together—it’s not chic, but it’s inspiring”) and New York, where he shops vintage stores and where he will present his 2016 resort collection—“a couture show in a garage,” as he explains. “I love couture, but the other side of me loves the street, and I think the mix of these two can create something new. When I go to New York and London, I love to see how very brave the young people are—they have no rules. Even the superchic ladies of the past, like Princess Irene Galitzine, had supermodern attitudes. Today they’d all be into street style.”

vogue.com

 

[Marc10]

Michele studied at Rome’s Accademia di Costume e di Moda—he initially hoped to become a costume designer—where he was inspired by visits from the legendary Piero Tosi, who created the costumes, along with the hair and makeup designs, for such image-conscious auteurs as Visconti, Pasolini, and Fellini. “He is a monument,” says Michele, “a god.”

Eventually, however, Michele considered fashion a more pragmatic career choice and left the city at the age of 22 to design knitwear in Bologna for Les Copains. Three years later, he headed back home to work with Silvia Venturini Fendi, whom he found “curious about everything, and fun to work with—I think that if you work in fashion, you need fun. And the Fendi Baguette,” he adds, “was exactly my idea of a ‘relic’—this is what I’m trying to do with Gucci.”

Michele admits that his eclectic vision and references are complicated for a design team to follow. He might cite Jane Austen (“I try to find the right dress of a modern Emma”) or the weird pastel film quality in an old Fellini movie. “I’m very inspired from the past,” says the man who calls his work “fake vintage” and washes many of his fabrics to give them a patina. “I’m not interested in the future—it doesn’t exist yet—but I’m really interested in the past and the contemporary. My apartment is full of antique pieces, but I put everything together like a modern installation.”

He shares a poetic eighteenth-century garret with his partner, Giovanni Attili, an urban-planning professor recently returned from working with the indigenous Haida Nation in British Columbia. Michele admits that it took him a while to tell the scholarly Attili that he owned 360 pairs of shoes.

“His taste was contagious,” says Attili, who nevertheless exercised a rigorous editing program when they set out to decorate the apartment, which was a series of grim, low-ceilinged offices before their renovations restored the original high rooms, now filled with an embarrassment of objects and furnishings. “When I was on my own it was completely crazy,” says Michele. “Twenty chairs to a room, for me, was completely normal. It was like a storage area.” Aside from chairs, Michele’s collections currently include a battalion of miniature portraits, a litter of Meissen porcelain pugs, a flight of Viennese painted birds, and a flutter of more feathered birds twittering away in Georgian gilded-cage musical boxes.

The couple also have a country house, where Michele worked in scenic isolation on the designs for his debut collections. Civita di Bagnoregio is an impossibly picturesque village two hours north of Rome, perched fantastically and precariously on top of a little mountain peak—like a landscape seen through the window behind a da Vinci Madonna.

In the late seventeenth century an earthquake killed 32 people here, and since then the mountain’s volcanic rock has crumbled away by slow (and sometimes dramatically rapid) degrees until the village is now a fraction of its original size. “It’s a very eccentric place for very eccentric people,” says Michele approvingly, nodding to such former inhabitants as the madcap Torinese Marchesa Ferrero, who, according to locals, hosted Princess Irene Galitzine and the Agnellis amid La Dolce Vita–esque parties in her twelve-bedroom manse, with rooms painted fuchsia and scarlet and hung with Warhols and Fontanas—paintings that were brought into town by lolloping donkeys. Michele loved it the moment that Attili brought him here; almost immediately they found a ruinous house built from the stone rubble of a former monastery over a network of Etruscan caves and spent the next year and a half restoring it.

One day Attili heard the crashing of falling trees and looked from the terrace to see a large part of woodland moving slowly down the hill, like Macbeth’s Birnam Wood edging toward Dunsinane. “It was in the distance, so I felt protected,” he says, “but it was really strange and macabre to see.”

Nevertheless, as Michele says, “every single time we return it’s like the first time. It’s like a love affair. If we only have this opportunity for a month or a year, I don’t care.”

Of course, at Gucci’s magnificent headquarters in the Pa*laz*zo Alberini, it’s suddenly easy to understand Rome’s special allure as well. Though its neoclassical facade was refaced in gleaming pale travertine in the nineteenth century, it was originally built in the early sixteenth century under the direction of Raphael. Michele’s vast studio, fragranced with the musky odor of Santa Maria Novella’s potpourri, occupies the two rooms constituting the former chapel on the palazzo’s piano nobile, with an elaborate polychrome ceiling. It takes the breath away.

“This is the real Rome,” he says proudly. “I never dreamed of something like this.”

In short order, Michele has layered the modern polished-travertine slabs on the floor with a patchwork of antique Persian and Oushak rugs and placed a vast nineteenth-century partner’s desk—now heaped with auction and exhibition catalogs, decorating magazines, and decorative art tomes—on top of it.
He has also created convivial seating groups with a suite of Napoleon III furniture that he left in its original boiled-egg yolk–yellow brocade but had piped in nail-headed coral-red ribbon and backed in a 1960s geometric print of the type that David Hicks used in his statement interiors. “Even in fashion I like to mix geometrics with florals,” Michele says as he surveys the boards in the studio upstairs, which is covered with fittings pictures from his 2016 resort collection. “It’s a cliché, but it’s beautiful.”

There are fourteen designers sitting in on that day’s meeting as he painstakingly reviews all the images and the thickets of fabric samples. “I don’t like a fashion show where you have only two prints—it drives me crazy,” he says, gesturing to a wall smothered in the prints he is using in the show. “I’d rather a woman spend five hours choosing a coat or a shirt—I prefer that they have the choice, like in a toy store! But the people from merchandising are a little bit confused about this. . . .”

In the room next door are sketches for a few celebrity dressing projects, including Georgia May Jagger’s dress—a lilac robe lavished with chinoiserie embroidery—for the Costume Institute gala in New York. (When Michele escorted her to the party a few weeks later, he found the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition, he told me, “so inspiring that I want to redesign my whole collection!”)

“I’m so happy,” Michele says amid the carefully organized chaos, “because for me, every day I work is a new day. I don’t care what will be tomorrow. It’s incredibly beautiful to work on Gucci because I can translate all my passion—I can create the character I want. And I’m having a lot of fun.”

vogue.com

 

[marcBarna]

Marc Jacobs a Fan of Alessandro Michele
By Bridget Foley

GUCCI’S NEW GUY: Alessandro Michele’s dandified designs for Gucci have found a fan in Marc Jacobs. Jacobs arrived in Paris this morning and headed straight to the Gucci store for tailoring on some pieces he bought in New York but didn’t have time to alter.

Offering that “I never in my life bought anything at Gucci,” Jacobs noted his interest piqued when he saw looks online that reminded him of “things I used to have.” (His just post-Parsons Amadeus collection comes to mind.) “I went in there and of course, I loved the clothes. It’s basically women’s blouses with shrunken men’s suits, which is perfect. It’s what I love. I went there and bought so many clothes.”

Jacobs said that while he hasn’t met Michele, he’s heard from many people, including his friend and stylist Katie Grand, that Michele is “really, really lovely and such a nice guy.” He then offered a creative’s take on such an assessment: “I can’t imagine anyone making those kind of clothes without having that kind of genuine sensitivity.”

wwd.com

 

[marcBarna]

At Work With Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s Creative Director
By VANESSA FRIEDMAN

In the fourth episode of Season 3 of our series that takes you behind the doors of the fashion world, Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Gucci, reveals why he thrives on chaos, how he got his guardian turtle and the hardest aspects of his new job. And that’s just what didn’t make it into the video. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)

Is this building special?

It’s a Renaissance building from a rich family. It’s one of the few real palaces with Raphael as the architect. It’s quite rare. Gucci took it when my predecessor, Frida Giannini, decided to move the creative office here from Milan. There are no business offices here. Marco Bizzarri, the C.E.O., stays in Milan. It’s nice to divide our work. This is just creative offices. Just crazy times.

Did you consider renaming it Palazzo Gucci?

No, I don’t think so.

Is it strange to be in a city so far from the rest of the fashion industry?

But I like that. I spend a lot of time in Paris, in Milan and in New York, and Rome is a little bit different. There is something in Rome, incredible, like in a Fellini movie. Everybody’s screaming and laughing very loud. It’s something that can give me more energy in terms of freedom. This is the area of the Rome that is for the bankers. On the other side of the river is the pope.

How did you imagine your office?

If someone had told me, “You will have an office painted from Raphael,” I mean, I didn’t believe it. So I had the perception that I had to put something that I can match with this beauty. Because I love old things. But the first thing I brought in was my giant desk. It’s a double desk. A square desk, so when you sit in front of me, you have the same space that I have on my side. I usually put a lot of books and things around me.

And there is also on the desk a turtle, a real turtle, from the 19th century. I bought it in one of the old bookshops in Rome. I was inside the bookstore one day, and I thought that it was like a little saint that protects the books. So I said, it could be nice for my books to have a turtle.

Did you bring the sofa and chairs, too?

Yes, it’s a sofa that I quite love, because there is something very romantic in the idea that you can have a conversation on this sofa. When I have to work alone, to read, to design, or look at books, I stay at my desk. But if someone comes to talk with me, I don’t want to stay in the desk because it makes me feel too far away. And also because it makes me feel like I am a banker. So if I have to talk with someone, I stay on the sofa. And if I have to work with creative persons, we go to the big table, which is in another part of my office.

It’s like a giant dining-room table.

I’m usually working with a lot of people. So I wanted something big for all the things that we need to work. My way to think about creation is like the end of the world. I love confusion. So music and image, picture, fabrics, people, person, talk: That’s my way to work. And food. And perfumes. I love perfumes. And flowers and plants, and dresses and vintage. Sometimes something that doesn’t really match with fashion: for example, a dog collar. The table is my mood board.

Is there a special pencil or pen that you use?

I always lose every single pencil I ever had. So I can draw with everything. With pencil, with pen. When I have to show something to the guys upstairs, I draw with everything, because I’m better with a pencil or with a pen than words. Last time, I was drawing on a napkin.

Talk me through your day.

I arrive between 9 and 9:30. It depends. My apartment is very close to here. But in Rome it’s very usual if someone meets you on the street, to talk. So I usually talk a lot. I come in the office, have my coffee. My assistants show me what I have to do. And I always say yes. I never say no. If someone wants to do something with me, I don’t want to say no. After, I start to work like crazy, because I have a lot of appointments. We sometimes have three collections at the same moment. It’s not really easy.

What is the hardest thing about your job?

Time. Time is against me. I need more time to work in every single project. This is the first big enemy. The other really hard thing is that I have to show myself. This is quite hard for me. I love to show my work, I don’t like to show myself. I don’t like photos, even from when I was very young. My dad always said, ‘Please, let me take a picture of you.’ But I didn’t like it. It’s strange because now, it’s really part of my job. I have to do the face of the company. At the very beginning, it was a nightmare. The first time I had to go out after the first collection in Milan, I was shocked.

Does this mean all the jewelry you wear becomes like your talismans?

I am a collector of jewels, old jewels. One of my favorites is a Georgian ring. One is from my mom. One is from the very end of the 18th century, south of Italy. One I made by myself. It’s a cushion-cut diamond. I love diamonds because diamonds let me dream. But not because they are precious, because they are a testament of the past. They are something you put on you just because you need to remember something, like a marriage, or someone who has died. And they can decorate the way you talk.

The only problem is in the airport, because you know that they have to check everything. When they look at me with all these kinds of ... jewels, they become a little bit nervous. Because it takes, you know, 10 minutes to take off every single piece from my hands.

nytimes.com

Video: http://www.nytimes.com/video/fashio...ion&module=lede&region=caption&pgtype=article

 

[Nani]

^Hahaha love the final sentence. I totally love him!

 

[eugenius]

^Hahaha love the final sentence. I totally love him!

Gross. I hate the final sentence.

Imagine being stuck behind him at the airport, with your children by your side, and you have to wait for this lame-brain to take off all his stupid jewelry, just to get past the metal-detectors.

Not cool at all.

 

[MDNA]

Dressing Madonna: Gucci’s Alessandro Michele reveals (almost) all


Suzy Menkes interviews Alessandro Michele, Madonna's new costume designer for the Rebel Heart tour.

“It’s like you’re in a temple, going to meet the goddess, and then you discover that the goddess is a big perfectionist and an incredible woman,” said Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, about how he met Madonna in rehearsal in New York.

“She is tiny and beautiful,” Alessandro continued. “The thing I really loved about her was her eyes - the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen; super green-blue eyes - I think she must have had the same eyes since she was six years old!”

The passionate designer, who has rocked Gucci with his magpie spirit, mixing inspirations from decades and centuries past, was spotted by über-stylist Arianne Phillips as new fashion blood for the Material Girl's “Rebel Heart” world tour.

Full disclosure: I was the person who suggested to Arianne at Prada's “Iconoclast” exhibition in London in February that Alessandro could create a new romantic look for Madonna.

“Essentially, my job is to be an editor for Madonna,” Arianne said, whose list of designers to dress the tour includes Jeremy Scott at Moschino, Prada’s Miu Miu, Fausto Puglisi and Alexander Wang. But she was eager to include Gucci’s Alessandro.

“I became entranced by his return to craft, the personal and feminine aspects that he has brought into his embellishment to the austere, slick Gucci,” Arianne said. “It was like a return to beauty and incredibly inspiring.”

Sitting with Alessandro in the Gucci showroom in Milan this week, surrounded by the spring/summer '16 collection of intensely coloured and decorated outfits, wild with frescoes of flowers, he explained his thoughts about dressing Madonna.

“It was an idea to mix Spanish and Latin attitude with chinoiserie, in the exact pink you can see in that skirt,” the designer said, pointing to a floral outfit on the rail.

“I thought that if Madonna wore the chinoiserie - a skirt with a super-long fringe - it would be like the divas of the 1920s, when the exotic was mixing Japan and Spain together,” he said.

But these fantasies had to pass the eyes and experience of Arianne. She missed Madonna's “Rebel Heart” tour's first night in Montreal because she was in Hollywood with Tom Ford. She is working on his new movie, starring Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal - a film she had been waiting for since working on Ford's A Single Man.

“It's an interesting circle; Alessandro Michele first came to Gucci under Tom Ford, and played the soundtrack of A Single Man at his first Gucci show,” the award-winning costume designer said.

Back to Madonna. It was in awe and trepidation that Alessandro - who was promoted to Gucci’s creative director after years in the team behind the scenes - walked into the studio on the outskirts of Manhattan at 11 at night to come face to face with his idol.

“They opened the door, and she was having dinner - grilled salmon - and said, ‘Welcome to my restaurant - do you mind that I’m eating?’” Alessandro remembers. “Then she danced for an hour and a half or two. She was ready to work after midnight.”

I can imagine Alessandro sitting in the studio - as he was in front of me in the Gucci show room - looking like a Romantic poet, with his beard and his rings that he changes all the time, “ because I have a huge box full of Georgian and Victorian jewellery”.

But as Arianne knew and Alessandro was about to find out on his midnight visit to Madonna, the art of performance clothes is different from fashion style.

“When they asked me to design, I wanted to give her something super-romantic with the idea of an exotic, dancing Frida Kahlo with ruffles, colour, and a different kind of aesthetic,” Alessandro said. “I started with something super-huge, because I did not imagine she would actually want to dance with this dress.”

“And then she tried on the outfits, started to move to check that everything is good to dance in. She really is a performer – she doesn’t just want to look beautiful – she cares more about the performance. She is obsessive about how to communicate with her audience.”

He confesses that he was taken aback by her commitment. “I was completely shocked when I came to the rehearsals; it was in a place you would meet a real dancer, super rough, not a place for a diva, but a place for a real artist.”

The Gucci designer also discovered that he would have to create outfits not just for Madonna, but also for all the dancers, making it a marathon job.

“I tried to sketch in my office, to put together an aesthetic like I usually do,” Alessandro said, describing one outfit as “Asian, with flowers and ruffles from Spain, something from Mexico, colours and English embroidery.”

I interrupted Alessandro’s stream of words to ask when he had first registered Madonna and her work.

“I was about 15 - I was a big fan,” the 43-year-old said. “She was the first pop musician that I really loved. Because I was in love with the English music, like The Sex Pistols, I was a bit of a snob about pop. But she was the first one who tried to mix a certain kind of punk aesthetic – like black lace - and she put it together and tried to become a new superstar. She really wanted to be a diva.”

I wanted to find out more about Alessandro, this designer who seemed to have sprung from nowhere with so much knowledge of history – of fashion and otherwise. He told me about losing his parents, saying that “I had a very beautiful relationship with my mother - she was so funny and intelligent. She died when she was 69 but she was like 20.”

Madonna, for Alessandro, has that spirit of eternal youth. “She is 57 but she’s like a teenager, and if you’re like a teen in your mind you are alive forever,” Alessandro said. '”I have to say that Madonna is really open. She is surrounded by people that love art and she has a lot of people around her that are perfectionists. She is very intelligent – that is why she is still at the top after 25 years.”

vogue.com

 

[ultramarine]

My prediction is that he'll have an Alessandra Facchinetti-like stint.

And IMHO,his menswear collection was HORRENDOUS, worse than Frida's gucci man ever was.

Apparently your wish went the other way ...

Did you guys see the critic's reviews of the latest?

Im enamoured with his aesthetic! I hated this first, made-in10-days collection but after that? SWOON!

 

[fashion doctor]

Speaking of Frida, do we know what she is up to these days?

 

[Nymphaea]

^I was wondering the same a short while ago, couldn't find anything.

 

[orchidee]

I wasn't a fan of Michele's Gucci at first, but I've warmed up to it SLIGHTLY. It will be interesting to see what direction he goes in once everyone's obsession with this sort of bohemian/magpie style of dressing eventually wanes though.

I'd expect that Frida is probably enjoying motherhood and married life, but I hope she's able to make a comeback somewhere.

 

[fashionista-ta]

I wonder if he's exaggerating about the rings ... He wears about 10 but it should only take a minute to get them off. If they're sized properly. I find his jewelry style inspiring.

 

[fashion doctor]

I'd expect that Frida is probably enjoying motherhood and married life, but I hope she's able to make a comeback somewhere.

I imagine the same thing. I could not find anything either.

It would be a shame if she didn't come back somewhere...

 

[george5]

 

[Lola701]

I really like his Gucci. It's more sophisticated than it has ever been in the last 10 years.
Their accessories has always been very good but the clothes are very good. For the first time in 6 years, i've bought Gucci's clothes and i'm happy.

While Frida clothes were luxurious (good fabrics, good details), they lacked sophistication in terms of execution. Her last FW collection was a disaster in terms of fit. Everything was so stiff!

I also want to see Frida doing her thing. I really don't know if her work at Gucci was a representation of her aesthetic.

 

[george5]

Gucci Show Coming To London

12 November 2015
Scarlett Conlon

ALESSANDRO MICHELE's Gucci show this season had all eyes on Milan, but for the fashion house's pre-spring/summer 2017 show it will be London in the spotlight. The brand confirmed to us this morning that it will show its cruise collection in the capital next year, although any further details - regarding date and exact location - have not be confirmed at this point.

It comes shortly after Chanel confirmed that it would be showing its own pre-spring/summer 2017 collection in Cuba in early May, continuing the trend that has been gathering pace among the big-name brands in the last couple of years for taking cruise collections on tour.

Given Michele's penchant for a vintage-inspired aesthetic, there are plenty of eccentric and historical venues that would generously complement his second pre-spring/summer collection (which was held in New York last summer). Only this weekend, the celebrated designer told Style, "I love English people, because they are the most quirky people in the world. They don't care."

vogue.co.uk

 

[fashionista-ta]

I really like his Gucci. It's more sophisticated than it has ever been in the last 10 years.
Their accessories has always been very good but the clothes are very good. For the first time in 6 years, i've bought Gucci's clothes and i'm happy.

While Frida clothes were luxurious (good fabrics, good details), they lacked sophistication in terms of execution. Her last FW collection was a disaster in terms of fit. Everything was so stiff!

I also want to see Frida doing her thing. I really don't know if her work at Gucci was a representation of her aesthetic.

I think her strength may be in accessories design. She never seemed to excel at designing for the body.

 

[Nymphaea]

Gucci’s Alessandro Michele to receive International Fashion Designer of the Year

Alessandro Michele is to receive the prestigious International Fashion Designer of the Year award at the British Fashion Awards, which take place in London next Monday evening. “I’m honoured and still a little incredulous,” he says.

Compared with Karl Lagerfeld or Ralph Lauren, Michele is hardly a marquee name. But if the marker of a fashion label’s relevance is the extent to which the high street chains have noticed it, then Gucci, the house for which Michele is currently creative director, is now the most influential in the world.

Zara and Topshop have already borrowed from his vintage-y boho lexicon. By next spring, Gucci-inspired ruffled dresses, high neck floral chiffon blouses, brocade A-line skirts and embroidered sweaters and tank-tops will be everywhere.

The speed and scale of Gucci's resurrection is astonishing. Michele, 42, was appointed creative director just ten months ago and had only a few weeks to design his first men and women’s catwalk shows. Each created a social media storm, partly because, even before gender fluidity became one of 2015’s cultural obsessions, he dressed his male models in women’s clothes, and vice versa, but also because he wiped away Gucci’s increasingly dated, hard edges and replaced them with a romantic patrician softness.

Michele claims he wasn’t nervous before those first shows, despite their radical departure from Gucci’s traditional formula. “For me it was really natural and spontaneous,” he says. “I didn’t realise the impact it would have had”.

His timing was immaculate: fashion was ready for a break with minimalism. Michele’s most popular pieces, including floral prints and a re-worked backless loafer, are sell outs, while sales of classic Gucci items, such as its double G belts and bowling bags, haven’t been this buoyant since its golden era in the 1990s.

All of which creates enormous pressure for him, at a time when designers’ work-loads have been pulled into focus. In the past month Raf Simons and Alber Elbaz, creative directors of Dior and Lanvin respectively, unexpectedly left their jobs. Top roles at the biggest houses are not for the fragile. Gucci, with revenues of around 3.5 billion euros per year (although these dipped last year, before Michele’s appointment) is one of the biggest.

Michele, who heads a design team of around 70 at Gucci, appears unfazed. “I like to work in an organic and natural way,” he explains. “There’s nothing in my job that feels like an obligation. Every aspect belongs to the same story.”

Credit should also go to Gucci’s CEO Marco Bizzarri, whom Michele calls his “Pygmalian”, who had the courage to appoint someone unknown even to most fashion industry insiders.

In fact, Michele has been behind the scenes at Gucci since 2002, when he was hired by Tom Ford, then creative director. In those days, Gucci’s HQ were in London – another reason why this award is extra sweet and why Gucci’s next major catwalk show for its cruise collection will take place here. “London’s where my career at Gucci began,” says. “My first office was in Tom’s studio. I’m obsessed with British culture, past and present. I am deeply in love with this country and its gorgeous history”.

telegraph uk

A bit premature imho.

 

[dodencebt]

The first thing that came to my mind was premature. Don't take me the wrong way, I know he has been working at Gucci for years and thus always being part of the creative process, but give the man some time at the helm of a brand before crowning him International Designer of the Year.

 

[george5]

It doesn't matter whether if You like it or not or how derivative It is, I think both F/W15 mens and womenswear collections were the Fashion moment of the year and honestly, I can't think about anything else. Now, if it's just hype or real talent; that's a matter of subjective opinion.