You can read every story about Alessandro Michele ever written; meticulously dissect each of his Gucci collections; watch clips of him working in his studio, accepting awards, arriving at the Met gala. You will glean that he’s talented and fun and doesn’t take himself too seriously. You will learn that he’s friends with Jared Leto and Harry Styles and has fabulous hair. And yet, if you found yourself in conversation with him, you’d still be taken aback by his effusiveness. Even through the banality of videoconferencing, Michele’s demeanor is wholly disarming.
On the day we spoke, he beamed into my apartment from his office in Gucci’s Renaissance-era design HQ in Rome. Within moments, I felt justified in having waited in line, just a few days prior, on a sweltering afternoon at the Gucci store in SoHo to buy my cousin a graduation gift. In the six and a half years since Michele was named creative director, he has created a world so fantastical that, for Gucci’s most enthused fans, heatstroke is a small price to pay for entry.
“I grew up in Europe, in Italy, and everything was about bourgeois,” says Michele, referring to cultural aesthetics. He was raised in Rome by an artistic, free-spirited father who worked as an Alitalia technician and a mother whose obsession with Hollywood glamour bode well for her career assisting a film executive. What he remembers of Gucci, from growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, was that it offered an alternative to that aesthetic. It was an iconic symbol of richness, as he puts it—signaling “jet set” in a way no other brand did.
Founded in Florence by Guccio Gucci in 1921, the label was initially a leather-goods brand, making saddles and horseback riding accessories. Those pieces gave way to handbags and luggage, and in the years that followed, a canon of designs and signature details emerged to push Gucci to the upper echelons of fashion: bamboo handles and horse-bit-adorned loafers; a flora print commissioned for Grace Kelly and a shoulder bag renamed for Jackie Kennedy; and two of fashion’s most recognizable status symbols, the double G logo and the green-red-green woven stripe. (Gucci is serious about those stripes. It has battled several brands in court over trademark infringement, notably reaching a settlement with Forever 21 over the fast-fashion giant’s use of them.)
In the late ’80s, Michele says, Gucci was “very dusty.” Harsh, but an assertion that fashion historians would agree with. Then Tom Ford arrived. “I remember exactly when Tom came to make everything fabulous. Everything was just fabulous and amazing and shiny and sexual and big.” He recalls buying a pair of chic, expensive, red-and-white flare-leg pants, and they felt transformative. “I went out during the night to the disco with these beautiful pants, and I felt myself like Mick Jagger. And I understood I was powerful.”
Indeed. After working with Silvia Venturini Fendi, Karl Lagerfeld, and Frida Giannini at Fendi, where he eventually became senior accessories designer, Michele, along with Giannini, was tapped by Gucci’s then creative director Ford to design the label’s handbags. At the time Gucci’s design team was based in London.
Michele remembers meeting Ford for the first time. It was a sunny London day, and Michele, who was 30 at the time, was so impressed by Ford’s kindness that, he says, he couldn’t resist an immediate acceptance: “ ‘Yes, I will be here very soon.’ ”
“The first week was all about this unbelievable office,” he says of the space the Gucci design team occupied until 2006, sleek and replete with white orchids. “There was nothing in the wrong place,” he says, and he was especially blown away by “the beautiful work of Tom. It’s like I was drowning in fashion.”
Now Michele has brought legions into that sea. When he became creative director of Gucci in 2015—replacing Giannini, who succeeded Ford—he famously redesigned the fall 2015 menswear collection in five days. In the years since, Michele has made maximalism the house’s permanent resident. His Gucci is one of clashing prints, exaggerated silhouettes, and seemingly every texture known to humankind. Pieces are colorful and subversive and amusing and strange—and dipped in sequins. And they’re a hit. In Michele’s third year at the helm, sales leapt 42 percent.
“He put a dent in the universe at that moment,” Leto says of Michele’s swift redesign of the fall 2015 collection. The two met in L.A. early on in Michele’s tenure as creative director and have been close friends and collaborators ever since. “I just think that’s such a beautiful story about seizing an opportunity and doing the work,” says Leto. “His passion and his love for what he does; his love for people and things, for art and culture and for his pets and animals and color celebration. That’s part of what I think makes everything work in the way that it does. It’s the special ingredient.” In a blink, Michele went from a behind-the-scenes handbag designer to one of the most visible and talked about people in fashion.
“I injected a few things that people were needing, like I was needing,” Michele says of his popularity. “Like freedom—a way to be deliberately yourself. Eccentricity that means personality.”
Like most labels of Gucci’s caliber, the brand has, for years, adhered to fashion’s calendar, presenting five or more collections a year. After Michele scaled back the number of annual shows in 2017 by combining the men’s and women’s collections, Gucci announced last May that it was forgoing the calendar altogether and doing just two shows a year. “I was not really comfortable doing a show every four months, three months,” Michele says, adding that the decision was made alongside Gucci president Marco Bizzarri. Michele says that even bigger companies like theirs must invest in creative freedom, which will pay dividends. “You prefer to be free, or you want people to force you to do something that you don’t want to do?” he says. “Creativity needs time.”
The announcement came as the world was grappling with COVID-19, which was especially devastating in Italy; more than 128,000 people have died of the disease there, and strict lockdowns have continued in the country. “If I went back to those days, I can see myself like a kid,” Michele says. “I was scared. I felt like death was knocking at my door.” Michele speaks often of his appreciation for nature and the connection he feels to plants and animals. He’s expressed it through innumerable designs—strawberry-print trousers, tigers screaming on T-shirts, and snakes slithering up sweaters—but he says it was most profound last year.
“I really felt myself like the rose on my terrace,” he says. “She was breathing, and I was trying to breathe.” It’s a simple analogy, a flower growing, but perfectly sums up Michele’s belief that we exist as part of nature, not rulers of it. He points to the Industrial Revolution and post-World War II eras as being particularly destructive. “We did a lot of really, really awful and terrible things to this beautiful earth. We feel super powerful, but we are not. We are so delicate. We need so many things. And it’s such a bad thing to disintegrate the earth just to fly faster than a bird, to leap faster than a cat.”
The fashion industry bears some of the blame for that disintegration, creating 10 percent of the world’s carbon emissions and an estimated 92 tons of textile waste each year. In an effort to scale back its own footprint, Gucci implemented a plan to halve the label’s carbon emissions by 2025 and is working to guarantee the traceability of 100 percent of raw materials. Last year, Jane Fonda and Lil Nas X were among campaign stars for Gucci’s first-ever sustainable collection, Off the Grid, conceived by Michele and made from recycled, bio-based, and sustainably sourced materials.
Not being able to hold physical shows for the latter part of 2020 didn’t keep Michele or Gucci from piquing the fashion industry’s interest or that of brand devotees. For the label’s fall 2020 campaign, models took self-portraits from their homes dressed in the collection; Gucci for gardening, Gucci for sweeping, Gucci for tending to one’s cat. Resort 2021, dubbed Epilogue and presented via livestream from Rome’s Palazzo Sacchetti, featured Gucci’s designers photographed in the pieces they created. Then came Ouverture of Something That Never Ended, a seven-part miniseries Michele codirected with Gus Van Sant for spring 2021. Starring Italian artist and actor Silvia Calderoni and including cameos from Gucci poster stars Harry Styles and Billie Eilish, it rolled out over a week of digital programming dubbed #GucciFest.
Later this year, the Ridley Scott-directed House of Gucci comes out in theaters. Based on the titular book by fashion journalist Sara Gay Forden, the film stars Adam Driver, Salma Hayek, Al Pacino, Lady Gaga, and, coincidentally, Leto, who plays Guccio Gucci’s grandson, Paolo Gucci. The house “didn’t cast the movie, they didn’t produce the movie—I doubt Ridley even knew I worked with Gucci,” Leto says. Still, filming in Rome afforded him some time with his friend. “Italy was quite shut down, so we would meet up and have dinner or lunch on his balcony or on my rooftop where I was staying. It was just fortunate to be able to share that time with him over there. They were also prepping the shows, so I would go and visit and watch them prepare, which is quite fascinating to see.”
Being the center of the fashion world’s attention took time for Michele to get used to. Perhaps because what he’s now idolized for—being his creative, earnest, heavily accessorized self—he grew up being bullied about.
“I came from a place where it’s not really easy to be yourself,” he says, noting that as a teen he was perhaps more eccentric than he is now. “Young people, they were not really aligned with you. It was a really, really, really tough time, but also a beautiful time,” he says, because he came to understand what it means to be brave about “who we are.”
While he says criticism of his work is easier to absorb than it once was—“It’s normal that people have an opinion about you, what you’re doing; I’m very open to listening”—Michele is not ashamed to bask in compliments. “I really go crazy for the people that love what I’m doing,” he says. “I saw this really young teenager, they stopped me in the street and said, ‘I like what you’re doing, I’m a fan of you.’ I mean, it’s such a beautiful act of love. You can’t resist.”
Frenetic as his job may be, Michele’s home life in Rome is grounded by routine. He wakes up each day around 7:50 a.m., sinks into his tub for a bath, then gets dressed and has breakfast with his longtime partner, professor of urban planning Giovanni Attili. “That is the most amazing moment of the day,” he says of his mornings, which also include spending time with the couple’s three dogs (two Boston terriers and a Chihuahua) and scrolling through online auctions to check on all the objects he’s bid on.
“I don’t know why, but there is a way to think that objects are stupid things that you don’t need, you can live without, or blah, blah, blah,” he says. “I’m obsessed with objects. I like the concept of beautiful things. I love things that belong to other people. I love vintage. I love pieces of fabric. I love glasses. I mean, it’s a way to enjoy the idea that you are living.”
Breakfast is usually ham and cheese on toast, espresso, and a glass of water with lemon. During the summer he indulges in honey, which he gets from his own apiary at his country house. “I adore bees,” says Michele, and if you’ve paid any attention to his designs over the past few years, you’ve noticed. The secret to maintaining his famous hair? Visits to his stylist, Mimmo, about once every 10 days, oil, and little else. “My hair routine is you don’t have to wash your hair too much,” he says—an approach his late father, who also had very long hair, swore by.
He is a ceaseless student of art, music, history, and literature, but not above a reality TV binge. “I was watching Big Brother VIP,” he says, his voice cracking into a slight laugh at the idea of people who “presume to be VIPs. It’s interesting, no? Because I was like, they are not famous. People decide with social media who is famous now,” he says. “I think my job needs to be in contact with everything. I’m not a snob at all.”
Michele is vocal about how lucky he is. Lucky to do what he loves, lucky to be in love. “Our souls are really in conversation,” he says of Attili. “I understand that it’s something really rare when you find someone that is so close to your sensibility.”
A few years ago when the two were going through a rough time, Michele partook in the hallowed my-relationship-may-be-ending ceremony of cutting one’s hair. Then he did what he does best and created something unconventional.
“I don’t want to say that we broke up, but we stop in a way because we needed maybe time to think about our trip,” he explains. “I took a piece of my hair, and I wove [it] like the Georgian-style jewels. I put stones [on it] and I did like a pendant; and I sent him this pendant, with my hair.”
Attili still has it, “in a very secret place,” Michele says. “I’m usually asking, ‘Why you don’t wear this pendant?’ He always says, ‘Because it’s too precious.’ ”
Last year’s string of films and socially distant photo shoots was followed by a hypnotic presentation of Gucci’s fall 2021 collection, Aria, which celebrated the brand turning 100. “I’m not a prisoner in the past,” Michele says. “People sometimes think that I’m obsessed with the past. I’m not. I’m obsessed with the present.” To that end, some of Gucci’s hallmarks were reimagined for today, like Ford’s velvet tuxedo (famously worn by Gwyneth Paltrow) accessorized with a leather harness; a boxy, sequined crop top and wool skirt combo resembling a jockey uniform (a nod to Gucci’s equestrian heritage); and bamboo accents on belt bags.
To zero live guests, models walked down a glossy white hallway while camera bulbs affixed to the walls flashed and popped incessantly. The soundtrack? Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang,” Bhad Bhabie’s “Gucci Flip Flops,” and more songs that name-drop the house; certainly nothing Guccio Gucci ever listened to. (To name a few more inspired tunes: “Green Gucci Suit” by Rick Ross, “Gucci Coochie” by Die Antwoord and Dita Von Teese, and “Gucci 2 Time” by friend of the house Gucci Mane.)
“I think that Gucci is a brand that needs new blood every month, every year. It’s a way to make it alive,” Michele says. “When I was thinking about this century, this 100-year birthday, I was like, Okay, let’s celebrate the first year of this baby. It’s a newborn every year.” That newness was apparent in the logos and exaggerated silhouettes plucked from Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga and Gucci-fied for the collection. (Luxury fashion conglomerate Kering owns both labels.)
In November, Michele will celebrate Gucci’s next collection in Los Angeles, a city where he spent a lot of time during his early creative director days. There were lots of stylists to meet and celebrities to dress. When we spoke, Gucci was still in the early stages of planning the show. Fidgeting with a square piece of double G-embossed leather (a very chic mouse pad, maybe?), Michele simply shares that “it will be amazing” and a “very significant moment for the brand.” Plus, he loves California, so this gives him “a beautiful excuse” to visit. Afterward, Michele will start working on Gucci’s next century of offerings.
“There will be a day that everything will be finished [for me] and someone else will start this beautiful trip,” Michele says. “It’s such an amazing trip, being creative director of this brand…. I hope that he [or] she will be as passionate as I am, because you need to put so much love on the table…. If you want to create something or you want to open a conversation, a real conversation with outside, you have to put yourself on the table. And that’s a lot. You must be so brave.”
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