CAST IN STONES
The first high jewellery collection dreamt up by Alessandro Michele has a poetic power that is born of his passion for the past, discovers Rachel Garrahan. Styled by Poppy Kain. Photographed by Paolo Roversi.
The first high jewellery collection dreamt up by Alessandro Michele for Gucci has a poetic power that is born of his passion for the past.
Enter Alessandro Michele’s office in the 16th-century palazzo (designed by Raphael, no less) that is Gucci’s design headquarters in Rome and you enter what he calls the “beautiful confusion” of his creative universe. Beneath soaring frescoed ceilings, reference books and fashion magazines are piled on every surface alongside an eclectic collection of objets, including tiny, elaborate 18th-century women’s shoes, Mickey Mouse and Gremlin dolls, antique vases and Persian rugs scattered across the vast stone floor. The room is a multilayered mash-up of past and present, of history and pop culture – the same potent mix that has characterised Gucci since Michele became creative director in 2015 and turned it into the fashion powerhouse it is today. It is perhaps no surprise that the designer was born and brought up here in Rome. At the end of the cobbled street that Gucci calls home is an ancient bridge, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, built by Emperor Hadrian in the second century, adorned with 10 baroque marble angels by Bernini, added in the 17th century. Rome wears its thousands of years of history and influence in multiple, often contradictory layers, and the same is true of Michele’s Gucci. The brand, which had
revenues of more than A$13 billion in 2018, has tapped into the Zeitgeist’s maximalist view of fashion, which blurs gender, blends cultural references and values authenticity over conventional beauty.
The journey to success has not been without missteps. Earlier this year, Gucci was accused of cultural insensitivity for a high-collared black jumper that evoked blackface with its framing of the wearer’s mouth in bright red. The brand quickly sought to limit the damage bymaking lasting changes, such as luring global and regional directors for diversity and inclusion, and setting up multicultural design scholarships at colleges around the world, Lagos, Mexico City and New York included.
For a brand that has long embraced multiculturalism, the blackface controversy seems an anomaly, and Michele himself shows a sensitivity to the epoch in which he is creating. Even his love of objects – he jokes that he does not understand the word ‘bin’ as we chat in his office, seated on an antique, green velvet sofa that closely matches his goldtrimmed smoking jacket – reflects an increasing rejection of throwaway culture. “My house is like this – a sanctuary for things,” he says, gesturing to the exquisite jumble. “They represent the power of humanity: the things we make with our hands.”
Michele’s passion for stuff naturally extends to jewellery. “They are the masterpieces closest to humans,” he says. “They’re not a house, a painting, a ceiling: they’re literally on you.“His conversation is peppered with rapturous whispers of “beautiful” and “unbelievable” as he talks me through his personal collection. “I’m like a kid rediscovering them,” he says.
Michele’s 565,000 Instagram followers will be familiar with his customary fistfuls of rings. Today, on each brightly nail-painted finger, he wears a characteristic mix of antique pieces and his own antique-inspired designs: an ancient Egyptian gold ring centring on a carved carnelian scarab sits alongside a delicately engraved English Tudor one; an exquisite 1960s Codognato momento mori ring featuring an enamel skull with gem-set eyes and a scarlet guilloché heart contrasts with a rustic gold band beloved for having been made for him by his long-term partner, Giovanni Attili, a lecturer in urban planning.
His collection of disconcerting 19th-century anatomical eyes led to the creation of a pinky ring that, when not staring out at you, reveals his zodiac constellation engraved on the reverse along with his nickname, Lallo. You can bet it was Michele who was behind Harry Styles’s pearl earring, which recalled the foppish splendour of Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh, when they co-hosted the Met Gala in May.
He has a particular passion for English and French antique pieces and spends hours combing Mayfair’s antique dealers for jewels and discovering the stories they hold. “I love history, so it’s an excuse to learn more,” he says. “Jewels are often tiny, but they are full of meaning.” As well as ancient Roman and Greek gems, he collects mourning jewellery from the Georgian and Victorian eras. “They are the story of a human being,” he says. “They’re like a little poem.”
Given his deeply sentimental attachment to jewels, it was inevitable that Michele would turn to designing a high jewellery collection for Gucci. “If Gucci is a piece of my soul, then it must have jewellery, too,” he says. High jewellery is the ultimate expression of art and skill; only a few houses in the world – storied jewellers such as Cartier and Boucheron, fashion houses Chanel and Dior – create at this level, seeking out the rarest gems and working with an elite band of craftspeople to produce unique pieces that can have seven-figure price tags. Now Gucci joins their ranks, revealing its first high jewellery collection, of about 200 pieces, during Paris haute couture in July.
And while the world may be familiar with the brand’s attentiongrabbing costume jewellery on the catwalk, Gucci’s high jewellery is elegant and restrained. Michele mixes elements from his favourite eras just as he mixes Ziggy Stardust references with 16th-century cuffinspired punk collars on the runway. “I was inspired by the idea that you were opening the safety deposit box of an old lady and it was full of beautiful things from different eras,” he says.
One parure draws on a favourite piece in his own collection: a late Georgian brooch in which peacock-feather-tipped white-gold arrows form a cross through a gem-set heart. In his version, rich cornflower-blue tanzanites and sunshine-yellow beryls contrast with diamonds to joyful effect. He does not feel any pressure to stay ahead of the times, as some jewellery houses do.
“They’re afraid to be similar to something that belongs to the past,” he says. “It’s like they feel guilty, but I don’t. Why can’t we play with things from another era and add colour and contrast and unusual gemstones?”
Elsewhere in the collection, ornate crosses are fanned from Victorian-style diamond-bedecked garlands, from which emerge lion heads holding precious gems in their deadly jaws. An elegantly restrained bracelet is transformed by a sweet-shop selection of canaryyellow and grass-green tourmalines, violet sapphires, fiery-orange mandarin garnets and iridescent opals. “By mixing the colours, you give life to every single stone,” says Michele. For him, the selection of a stone is about the gut-punching intensity of its colour and clarity. “A beautiful tourmaline can be better than an emerald.”
The designer has been involved in every stage of the collection, from the stone selection to the opening of a standalone Gucci jewellery store on Paris’s Place Vendôme, and every detail is loaded with historical references. An elaborate gold-embossed leather presentation folder containing gouaches of the designs for sharing with a select group of Gucci clients was the result of his imagining it being delivered to the Countess of Castiglione, one-time mistress of Napoleon III and a former reclusive resident of Place Vendôme herself.
Naturally, in the gender-fluid world of Gucci, these creations are designed to be worn by men and women alike. “It’s crazy to say that men and women’s jewellery must be different,” says Michele, pointing to the Georgian aristocrats bedecked in diamonds and the Indian maharajas who descended on Place Vendôme in the early 20th century “with caskets of precious gems to be turned into fashionable creations”.
“If I were a client invited to Gucci, I would love to have one of these necklaces,” he says as he flips through the designs. No doubt he is losing himself in another moment back in time.
“I was inspired by the idea that you were opening the safety deposit box of an old lady and it was full of beautiful things from different eras”