At the heart of the Gucci Exquisite collection lurks the axiom that nothing is truly what they seem. Creative director Alessandro Michele uses mirrors as metaphors to encourage us to witness hidden worlds hidden amongst our reflections.
What is in a mirror? Rarely, if ever, do we ask that question. An object meant to be pure is, ironically, home to demons. How we observe ourselves can be a mirror of the nightmares we are haunted by. Some of the most vigorous philosophers use it as a jumping point to interrogate our desires, dreams and, frighteningly, the very nature of our reality. Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho once insisted that “the visible is always a mirror of the invisible. Reality is imagined before it manifests itself.”
Suppose Coelho’s philosophy is an elegy for the reality that hides right beneath our line of vision. In that case, Alessandro Michele’s work at Gucci provides us with a helping hand to see that hidden world hidden amongst our reflections. Mirror philosophies were heavily on Michele’s mind throughout the Gucci Exquisite show: an 84-look compendium dedicated to the abstraction that, like mirrors, it possesses the ability to shift our realities. And while terror immediately spews from most dissections on mirrors, the creative director chose instead to focus on the beauty of it, a perspective Michele interprets as a “myth of the exact vision that inevitably ends up in freezing the immaginific power of the world.” Here, mirrors offer Michele a chance to expand beyond fashion’s limitations — the discourse of form and function — and reveal a compelling thesis on “metamorphosing” ideas.
“For this reason, I wanted to restore another feature of the mirror,” says Michele. “That is, building aberrations, enchantments, ghosts. I’m thinking about the magical mirrors described in the catoptrics treatises of the 1600s: mirrors set into precious Wunderkammer that behave like machines of expansion and transfiguration of reality. In these theatrical machines, the weirdness of the optical trick creates dizziness and wonder: a head losing its eyes, a tree growing into a forest, human bodies turning into horses, divinities becoming multi-headed. It’s the celebration of the metamorphosis, where the playful mechanics of refractions shatter every spatial limit and pave the way for escape.”
At the heart of Gucci Exquisite lurks the axiom that nothing is truly what they seem. Assembled into multiple contemplations just as mirrors can warp and distort should we allow it, each look bears a distinct character shimmering in a line of visual conflict. The first few looks were (now) typical of the creative director; offerings of wool suits in ‘vintage’ cuts, a lace body peeping through the crevices of an oversized fur coat, and the sharp-edged use of leather were truthfully nothing new. It was not until the reveal of a swimming cap and an iridescent blue wool suit bearing the logo of Adidas and its three-stripe parenthesis that later made sense of Michele’s irreverent desertion of warping reality.
“Clothes offer themselves as makers of manifold,” explains Michele. “Wearing them means to cross a transformative threshold where we become something else; it means to be able to enhance and articulate in a different way our identity and our exhibiting potential.”
A potpourri of fashion, one look at a time. The collection leaps from one visual nod to the next like a broken television skipping between channels; each ensemble appears more erratic than the previous until it clusters together as an amalgamation of all the various synthesis. Gucci’s signature equestrian design elements continued to travel along the remaining looks, only to reveal a surgically precise serotonin release with the appearance of the Adidas logo on what would be a corset, an overcoat, or the House’s Beloved bags. The collaboration is also significant for Gucci, not just asa way to see it as a merger of both brands’ identity and consumers but as a tool Michele could use to further blend fashion’s culturally-significant objects from fashion into one collection. One should only see it as Michele borrowing the aesthetics.
There is a careful balance between steady patience and uninhibited release at play throughout Gucci Exquisite — an inkling towards youth. Michele has always been fascinated with the young and, perhaps more importantly, the idea of trend cross-pollination that comes directly from the youths of today. With the rest of the collection, Michele compresses multiple fixtures of personalities in several looks. An oversized, washed-out velvet jacket paired with a beret might suggest connotations of “beatnik” trends, but Michele evolves the look by adding a spiked necklace— something only punks were known to have worn. Conversely, it was bowling checks on a suit which was immediately conflicted by the pairing of netted tank tops typically seen at raves.
Like the conflict it mirrors in ways we can choose to see, the collection is as dazzling as it is extensive, offering a plethora of options to engage with yet triggering a strangely placid emotion. Its concept might be the most original — many of these ideas have played out through the fashion landscape for years but were never as forward and obvious as Gucci Exquisite. Even so, Gucci Exquisite’s best moments are like marathons that induce delirious trance-like states so absorbing that it is hard to imagine looking at fashion any other way.
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