FAREWELL ALESSANDRO
With the fashion industry in shock at the recent news that Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele is leaving the company, viewing the travelling show Gucci Garden Archetypes is now more poignant than ever. The exhibition, which is a celebration of the brand’s 100th anniversary, first opened in Florence last year and has since travelled through Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo to arrive in Sydney, where it is now open at the Powerhouse Museum. The immersive experience explores the ideas that Michele has conceived during his eight-year tenure at the Italian fashion brand and recreates some of his most memorable campaigns.
“I didn’t think about an exhibition of clothing or garments, I thought about my narrative of the brand,” said Michele, of the inception of Gucci Garden Archetypes. “I imagined an ancestral place — I thought about the genesis of the images in the world, and I thought about the archetypes, because archetypes produce what we see in fashion.”
One of the first rooms reimagines the campaign for Gucci’s Bloom fragrance — which was released in 2017 and starred actresses Dakota Johnson and Hari Nef and the photographer Petra Collins — with a pink floral couch surrounded by wildflowers and the scent lingering in the space. Another features life-like wax mannequins inside a bright pink and red club-night bathroom, as an extension of the brand’s spring 2016 collection, which was inspired by the maximalism and excess of the 1970s. “The advertising campaign is the following chapter after the show,” adds Michele. “It’s like a theatre play, and the clothes have become the costumes.”
Also represented is the set of The Beloved Show, a campaign whereby Michele imagined a late-night talk show hosted by British personality James Corden, with guests including Harry Styles, Sienna Miller and Awkwafina. Another walkthrough room replicates a moving subway car, inspired by the visuals accompanying Michele’s debut collection for Gucci in 2015.
But the highlight of the exhibition, and the room that Michele says he is closest to, is inspired by his fall 2018 collectors campaign; it is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling mirrors, with walls and cabinets filled with curiosities, including stuffed toys, cuckoo clocks and porcelain. “[It is] the idea of worshipping objects, of living, collecting and accumulating things,” says Michele. “That campaign was designed because I have a special relationship to objects and I think that my work also means having a relationship to the physical objects surrounding us.”
The exhibition, which is open in Sydney until January 15 before heading to London, serves as a glimpse into the inner workings — and creative genius — of one of the most important figures working in fashion today. “This is my way of working — I never stop thinking about what is happening inside the story,” adds Michele.
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