“To travel is to live,” the master of fairytales Hans Christian Anderson wrote. He wouldn’t have found an instant friend in Alessandro Michele, who took Milan by storm on Monday with a ravishing Gucci men’s collection dedicated to the dream of traveling, only to meet journalists post-show with the words: “I hate to travel. I’m a really bad traveler.” It was kind of genius and something only Michele — one of the warmest and most unpretentious designers in the industry — could get away with. He elaborated: “I quite hate it, because I think in order to travel you don’t need to take a plane. You can get on the subway — that’s a strange kind of sea.” He’d been thinking about sailors, the dashing kind who turn up in Jane Austen novels all travelled and worldly and sweep young maidens (and probably a few flamboyant bachelors) off their feet. “Or Marco Polo,” he said, exercising his trademark liberty of hyper-historical referencing.
The collection did what Michele’s collections do best: it opened a window to his heart and soul and the intricate brain that feeds them, in a sumptuous flood of the keepsakes he picks up on his own travels — which, as we now know, don’t actually have to involve leaving his house. “If I change the tapestry of my chair from pink to blue, I sit and I travel. If you a read a book you travel,” he pointed out, his heavily bejeweled fingers gesturing away. “It’s my way of being archeological with all the little pieces I pick up everywhere. This is my to travel. It’s my way to say, ‘Travel more than you can’.” But there was something more pressing on his mind, something he wanted to say. “I know my language is sometimes very… Always the same,” he paused. “But it’s the way I live. I always try to keep beautiful things in my life, so I put everything into the collection.” It was retort at a fashion industry so eager for the new it’s sometimes blinding, and a statement reflected in the collection’s t-shirts featuring the word “future” — no doubt a jab at those always obsessed with the next big buzz.
But Michele needn’t defend himself. Like his Anglo-centric cruise collection presented in Westminster Abbey a few weeks ago, this men’s collection cemented his ability to develop within his own defined aesthetic. It was more romantic, more 19th century than 16th century, and that’s where he’d easily have found common ground with Hans Christian Andersen, the eternal dreamer and traveller who epitomized the 19th century’s infatuation with the golden ages of yesteryear, where painters and poets sought not to live in the past but to mimic its magic. Michele is fashion’s fairytale dream-spinner, and our reminder that life can always be more beautiful. “There were a lot of references, but I want to say, this is our way of belonging to our time. I put some writing on t-shirts about the future, but it’s a kind of word I don’t really understand. I don’t want to say I’m against the future but I’m against the idea of having to project my future,” he said, explaining the motives behind his enthrallment with history.
Only the day before his show, his friend Miuccia Prada presented a similarly travel-themed collection. She said it was about a world going through a difficult time where you never know just when you might have to move to a different country, or indeed continent. Where Prada has always been happy to explain her motifs, putting collections into a social and political contexts, Michele isn’t one for answers. Much like Gosha Rubchinskiy, who couldn’t be more different from Michele but prefers not to explain why his collections look like something out of the Soviet Union, Michele merely puts his world in front of you and takes a step back. You could analyze his collection on Monday for ages, call it nostalgia or dreamy escapism from a cruel world. But the truth is, Michele’s Gucci is neither of those things. It serves the exact same purpose of Andersen’s fairytales: to entertain the children and enlighten the adults — and maybe make the world a little bit more magical doing so.
And just what was Donald Duck doing in there? “The first trip I took when I was very young was with Donald Duck, because, you know, he was always traveling with the uncle,” Michele reminisced. “It was my way of traveling at age five. Travel is a dream.” But it felt pretty damned real.
Credits
Text Anders Christian Madsen
Photography Mitchell Sams