HODGE PODGE
Gucci Creative Director Alessandro “Lallo” Michele, who’s been leading the brand for almost two years, has brought it new life. His ensembles suspend the brand’s established image (ultra-chic body-conscious Euro-centric separates) for a layered hodge-podge styling that piles eccentric accessories over richly-colored, -textured, and -embellished garments. The runway shows and ads project artsy, nerdy, thrift store bohemia, animated with a sleepy, muted sexuality. Lallo’s Instagram feed reveals an imagination focused on rapture and texture – a patch of wallpaper, a stormy sky, a tabletop tableaux, an eighteenth century cornice – rather than trend, form, and fashion. Among the riot of plaids, prints, patchwork and paisleys in the clothes, he incorporates, skillfully and quietly, iconic brand identifiers: the double-G hardware, the signature canvas, the horsebits, and the tri-color stripe. No luxury house could ask for keener leadership.
The clothes Gucci showed for Spring Summer 2017 are just what was expected. The dense, cluttered new Gucci look is instantly recognizable; these clothes can’t be mistaken for those from any other brand. Prada and Miu Miu are offering similar crazily mismatched separates, adorned with patches and ornaments, but those garments have an avant garde feel. Michele’s clothes aren’t intellectual, and they aren’t self-consciously freakish either, intending only to draw attention to themselves. Instead they have a strange innocence. A woman seems to be wearing this argyle sweater, these giant jewelled glasses, this quilted bag, and these elephant leg trousers, because she feels that each piece is beautiful, a thing well-known and well-loved. This is the way that children often dress, without concern for identity and conformity. In the world of high fashion, it’s an act of subversion.