Image Courtesy of Gucci.
Since he was appointed as Gucci’s creative director in 2015, Alessandro Michele has encapsulated us all with his fascinatingly surreal conception of fashion. From the charming A LOVE STORY PRESENTED BY GUCCI (a love that certainly lives happily ever after) to the ethereal collaboration with The North Face, which brought the professional technicality of the outdoor brand together with the enchanted aesthetic of Gucci. Running across the entirety of Michele’s concepts are references to film, theatre and literature, building a world that goes beyond the physical garment.
Images Courtesy of Gucci.
“If you ask me, a garment is not, and never will be, just a piece of fabric,” says Michele, “It’s rather the means through which we are able to unfold who we really decide to be, it’s how we shape our desires and the ultimate sense of our staying.” References to film, therefore, allow Michele to construct a cinematic vision of reality that blends desire and fantasy with an underscore of eclectic stories. “I’ve always been charmed by cinema. For its power to tell stories that can probe human adventure and its drift. For its visionary power to dig up in the real, making it vertiginously imaginative and questionable. Such a careful look on the human, after all, is so close to me.”
Images Courtesy of Gucci.
Gucci’s latest campaign is “Exquisite”, both for its execution and ability to blur the line between fashion and cinema. An ode to Stanley Kubrick, the visionary of film, Alessandro Michele adopted Kubrick’s “incendiary approach” to creativity through “disassembling, blending, grafting and reassembling them…seizing [the] movies, romanticising them [and] populating them with [his] clothes.” In the campaign, we see references to a number of Kubrick’s most iconic films: The Shining (1980), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975). Combining glamourous dystopias with gothic bourgeoisie drama, “Exquisite” is an embodiment of Michele’s exploration of what it means to be a great director.
Through this symbiosis of Kubrick and Gucci, film and fashion, “clothes get closer to bare life again.” The designer explains, “They turn into highly imaginative functional prosthesis, and they do so to tell a story. A story that shatters, enchants, tortures, ignites. Because it’s the story of the human that dwells in each and every one of us. As Stanley Kubrick knew too well.”
Images Courtesy of Gucci.
Credits
Creative Director: Alessandro Michele
Art Director: Christopher Simmonds
Photographers & Directors: Mert & Marcus
Make up: Thomas De Kluyver
Hair: Paul Hanlon
Replicas of the original costume designs curated by Milena Canonero and Charlotte Walter.
‘With thanks to University of the Arts London, home of the Stanley Kubrick Archive, Warner Bros. Consumer Products, and the Stanley Kubrick Film Archives.’
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and all related characters and elements © & ™ Turner Entertainment Co. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, BARRY LYNDON, EYES WIDE SHUT, THE SHINING and all related characters and elements © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (s22)