Alessandro Michele Renaissance at Gucci
Since his appointment as creative director in January 2015, Alessandro Michele has been directly responsible for Gucci’s current renaissance. After attending the Academy of Costume and Fashion in Rome, Michele served as senior accessories designer at Fendi working alongside Karl Lagerfeld and the watchful eye of Silvia Venturini Fendi before joining Gucci under Tom Ford in 2002. Michele has worked his way up through various positions at Gucci and associated brands for 12 years. While there, he completely redesigned Gucci’s 280-year-old designs and brought innovation to the accessories for which he was responsible. His enduring colorful, eccentric designs have been quickly adopted by style icons and celebrities, bringing much needed worldwide attention to the Gucci brand.
Under Michele’s helm the runway shows fluidly mix gender, sexuality, and seasons. This shift has help to turn the $3.9-billion-a-year fashion house into an overnight sensation. His quirky, “cat lady” sweaters and old fashioned tea dresses have sparked many of the global trends in women’s Ready-to-Wear. “It’s a game changer not just for the brand but for what’s happening for fashion in general,” gushes Sarah Rutson, Net-a-Porter’s vice president of global buying. While Michele acknowledges that sex will always be “very important” to Gucci, he would like to create a new female allure that is more feminine and personal. “I really don’t consider Kim Kardashian sexy,” he says by way of example. “She’s like one of those primordial sculptures of fertility, like the Venus of Willendorf.” Referring not to Kardashian but to women in general, he adds. “Some women are forced by men to look a certain way, to be accepted by the general public, and I find that terrible.”
Michele rebels against the current trend of women wearing almost exclusively black, tight-fitting outfits by reintroducing pink, yellow, and bright colors into his Bohemian hippy-chic collections. As an avid collector he finds inspiration for many of his obsessions by collecting vintage pieces, as is immediately apparent from the rings, bracelets, and necklaces worn by the designer. In less than a year as Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele won the prestigious “International Designer of the Year” at the British Fashion Awards 2015. A remarkable feat after only ten months, and with it he wiped away Gucci’s hard edge and replaced it with his brand of romantic patrician softness.
Get Michele’s signature look with these Gucci rings:
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