Alessandro Michele

What is truly original? A language – whether it be verbal, visual or gestural – doesn’t develop in a vacuum, but originates from a sort of chemical reaction sparked by something already existing. If authentic, a creative act is in fact born from a theft taken to unforeseen consequences. One steals an attitude from the muse, a colour from nature, and from there one starts inventing. Pupils start their journey from the style of their masters; a vogue simmers when taken to foreign territory, a bit like the alien that Ridley Scott and HR Giger conceived. After all, once again in Godard’s words and in an unheard-of yet happy pairing of classic linear thought and postmodern non-linear logic, it is not important where you take things from, but where you take them to. This is even more evident in fashion: the new originates from an incessant, cathartic, superstitious elaboration of the past that stops time, or at least it tries to, through remaking, endlessly. What would the ’80s have been without the ’40s, and the ’70s without the ’20s? Even the modernism of the ’60s, so inebriated with the future, clearly owes more than a little bit to the brisk lines of the jazz era. Not to mention the creators, who are always amazingly indebted. What would Yves Saint Laurent have invented had he not looked at the Rive Gauche of the protesters or at Mondrian; or Gianni Versace had he not laid his eyes on Greek vases and on Beppe Spadacini’s prints; or Walter Albini had he not been intrigued by Benito’s drawings and by the sophistications of the Gazette du Bon Ton? “I am brazen. For me, creating means regurgitating, distorting and assembling everything that has passed through me and continues to do so,” says Alessandro Michele, tireless appropriator and Gucci’s creative director. Michele is an author, and his language is unequivocal. In a short amount of time, he has triggered a pleasurably decorative shock wave that has turned the Florentine fashion house into the epicentre of a liberated, libertarian and liberating Baroquism. It has become the encyclopaedic temple of narrative and maximalist fashions, which celebrate diversity while freeing their political power in the party-hard superficiality that glorifies outcasts, skanks, queers and beautiful freaks. And it does this through mad collages imbued with the past yet in no way nostalgic, as they are devoid of established hierarchies and orders.

As a result, Renaissance and kitsch, Star Trek and Elizabethan theatre, refinement and pop often coexist in the same outfit. With sardonic humour, he calls himself a washing machine that spin-dries everything. He is, indeed, a situationist of pastiche, an inexorable maker and undoer of lavish spatiotemporal twines. His kaleidoscopic world is a catalogue of clichés in which everything goes with everything as long as the clash of irreconcilable opposites is deafening. And this is exactly his way of being original. “Clothes are endless possibilities for meaning, because with every change or different association you are a different person,” he professes. For sure, Alessandro Michele is not the first appropriationist in fashion history and will not be the last. But he is probably the most archaeological and accurate and surely the most derisive, because he plays it hard and risky with pseudo copies that unsettle the moralists while he keeps on elaborating new juxtapositions. “I am almost pornographic in the way I pay homage to what I like and what has influenced me,” he explains, referring to the deliberate literalness of his own citations. The assemblage, instead, is always idiosyncratic, hectic and Dionysian. “I find things, but many things find me, because chance is also imaginative,” he adds, describing his modus operandi made of both chaos and order. “Quoting means rehabilitating, transforming. Denying this means nullifying the very act of creation.” Such crystal clarity leaves no room for doubts, but despite it Alessandro Michele has often been questioned for the very same zest for appropriation which is his own creative trademark, and ended up being the victim par excellence of the anti-appropriation police. “My sources are so evident that, perhaps wrongly, I don’t consider captions necessary,” he explains. “For me, reworking the past over and over again is a way not to trivialise the garments and not to obsess over hem lengths. What I am interested in, as a matter of fact, is telling a story and, if someone sees fragments of other stories in it, be my guest. I don’t have to justify myself. What is urgent for me is what I want to say.” Michele especially refers to the controversy that spread on Instagram at the end of May for a look in the cruise 2018 collection which refers quite literally to the work of Daniel Day, the tailor who in the ’80s in Harlem created a magnificent idea of appropriationist ghetto tailoring with the Dapper Dan atelier, defining the image of the first hip-hop stars from scratch, through the illicit theft of luxury labels’ logos. “Maybe I should have said it openly, but to me it was far too obvious,” he explains. Theorising the neo-mannerist wave of the ’80s, art critic Achille Bonito Oliva forged the formula “the traitor’s ideology”, which is a perfect way to define appropriation as creative practice. It is exactly the way Michele works: he respects his sources by betraying them at will to compose overwhelming symphonies. This includes Crancach’s paintings, Walter Albini’s and Botticelli’s beauties, which, however, don’t trigger the politically correct rage of social media censors. “I believe the problem springs from a widespread cultural attitude. Citations have always been a fundamental part of everyone’s cultural journey. Today, however, citations are confused with paralysing nostalgia. On the contrary, I believe obsessing over the future is the best way not to live the present.” Here we get to the vital point. Seeing the past as a lively mine full of references and possibilities is a way to bring the present into the limelight. What is fascinating in Alessandro Michele’s work is his rewriting of time, akin to a psychedelic trip that frees cognition and knowledge, and that finds the value of today exactly in archaeology. “I grew up with a father who didn’t wear a watch and this has permanently marked my relationship with time,” he concludes. “All that inspires me and all that I quote, whether it is one day or four hundred years old, occurs at the same time before my eyes, so it becomes the present. It’s my present, my time and it’s the only thing that I can and want to describe.” • original text page 191