How Gucci Designer Alessandro Michele Kick-Started Fashion's Genderless Revolution
Welcome to GQ's New Masculinity issue, an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, overturned, and evolved. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here and hear Pharrell's take on the matter here.
Thank Alessandro Michele for one of the greatest styling cues of 2019—A$AP Rocky's monarchist silk babushkas. The 47-year-old creative director of Gucci introduced a similar style at his 2017 women's cruise show, held in the chapel of Westminster Abbey, as a straight-up homage to the staid scarves of Queen Elizabeth II herself. Michele is also the source of Ryan Gosling's '50s prom shirt at the 2017 Academy Awards, Donald Glover's groovy velvet suits, and the ongoing Jared Leto-saince that has turned the musician-actor away from off-duty-Angeleno style and into a gentleman of the Canyon, caftans and all.
“The shift in menswear started by Michele is seismic, with that first eerily pretty ensemble predicting a half-decade of luxurious revolt.”
The list of men who flock to Michele for suiting, loafers, baubles, and kerchiefs seems endless, in fact, and on it are names as diverse as Swiss tennis star Roger Federer and Harlem designer and hip-hop world legend Dapper Dan. What's more, many of these men are equally as likely to sport a Gucci dress as they are a Gucci loafer. At the 2019 Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Gala, Leto showed up wearing a Michele-designed red evening gown and carrying a model of his own head as an accessory. Michele's version of masculinity has become fashion's predominant one: an idea not just of men in skirts but of men embracing loveliness, textural richness, and glamour—things that in the 20th century were reserved largely for women. Gucci's celebrity friends and collaborators are helping to popularize this aesthetic in the mainstream and, as a result, allowing the designer to push himself further and further in restyling the modern man.
Michele lets out a big, bright laugh at the recollection of Leto's Met-gala look. He has just returned from summer holiday and is gazing down past his chestnut locks into the FaceTime screen, tapping his bulky rings on the table in Gucci's Rome design offices for effect. “Jared is a person who loves to experiment,” Michele says. “When I saw him with the evening dress, I thought that it was so unbelievably beautiful. At the end of two days of big conversations—on the phone, in his room, during a dinner—I said, ‘Choose the red dress with the head. You will be like a Shakespearean character.’ ”
“The era of being masculine only if you have a specific suit—it's over. Also, women need men who are more connected with a woman's world.”
The Bard is an apt reference for a designer who stages his runways more like theatrical events than typical catwalk fodder. It's a precedent set by his debut collection, for fall 2015. At that time, Michele was acting as an interim creative director, given just five days to make something to present on the brand's Milan runway after the unceremonious departure of Gucci's then creative team. What he dreamed up was nothing short of revelatory. The flaxen-haired model Hugo Goldhoorn opened the show in a red silk pussy-bow blouse and pooling lank trousers. Bracelet-sleeved suits in deep emerald, Young Turk velvet-trimmed coats, and a new iteration of Gucci's banker-bro loafers, stripped of their backs and lined with Einsteinian tufts of kangaroo fur, followed. Less than five days later, Michele (and that pussy-bow blouse) was officially appointed the creative director of Gucci. Five years later, the shift in menswear started by Michele is seismic, with that first eerily pretty ensemble predicting a half-decade of luxurious revolt.
Michele designs both the menswear and womenswear collections simultaneously, pulling ideas from one to the other. “It's more interesting, sometimes, to work on the menswear. You can really shout, because menswear is more rigid,” he says. “When you try to manipulate the codes of a man's wardrobe, you can do something really new. It's pretty interesting. I started thinking about an idea of beauty that, for me, it doesn't belong to men or women. It's almost the same; that's why I put a few men's looks on women and the reverse. You can be more masculine showing your femininity.”
In the five years since the fateful show that ordained Michele as one of fashion's utmost provocateurs, he has staged an overthrow of power in the world of menswear by fashioning new male identities. Michele's conquest occurs with a stitch in place of a sword. That stitch can hold a hem flared out, so when Donald Glover slinks across a stage, he does so with a glamazon kick. It can hold the shoulder of a jacket tight and high, to relay a schoolboyish charm, or it can secure a button on a silk blouse—even if it looks best undone. All together, these are luxuriously made garments that allow guys to liberate themselves from antiquated codes. No longer must you choose between powerful and cool. Michele's work allows for the conveyance of a full range of characteristics: sensual, coy, intellectual, menacing. It's a sharp pivot from Gucci's last heyday, in the '90s, when Tom Ford popularized hot-bod hedonism with bare chests and tight trousers.
But to call Michele's fey fashion radical in the year 2019 is to misunderstand the designer's mission. The clothes beloved by both Sir Elton John and Snoop Dogg are, even at their wildest, classically minded. “I understood,” Michele says, thinking back to his first show, “that there is nothing more new than an old beautiful code.” He continues: “Dress codes belong to politics; society pushes people to obey the rules—it's easier. I think that we must completely break from that. Sometimes people feel more comfortable in other types of dress, in other lives. A pop star or an actor, they can be a guide for other people if they show something different.”
No one is a better embodiment of the Michele method of masculinity than Harry Styles, the British capital-P, capital-S Pop Star with a voice and a visage that can launch a thousand shrill screams wherever he goes. “I think Harry is the perfect expression of masculinity,” Michele says of his friend and collaborator. “He is so relaxed in his body, and completely open to listen to himself. He likes to play with dress, with hair. I think that he is really the incarnation of a pop icon of the next generation. He's the only one on the market, I think, that is really in contact with his feminine part. He's sexy and he's handsome.” For the same Met gala that Leto attended dressed as an Elizabethan diva, Styles wore a sheer black pussy-bow blouse with high-waisted trousers, as an homage to the New Romantics of the '80s, part David Sylvian and part David Bowie. “The friends that I choose in my career, they really reflect my idea of beauty, so I think that they are really connected with their feminine part,” says Michele. “For me, it's more masculine. A man is really attractive when he listens to his feminine part.”
How Gucci Designer Alessandro Michele Kick-Started Fashion's Genderless Revolution
From the cult of Aphroditus to Jimi Hendrix, men in skirts or ivory poet tops were never out of style, really. But the magic of Michele's reappropriation of history is that he does it not verbatim but with the hazy almost-rightness of a dream, styling togas over classic gray wool suits or '80s track pants with swaggy '70s blouses. As such, Michele's Gucci promises that to lace up a pair of Ultrapace sneakers or step into its monogram slides is never a sacrifice of self in the name of style. The mash-up of references, the diversity of products, allows for everyone from Offset to Bradley Cooper to find a Gucci piece to love. “It's not that I want to see all men in a gown. That's not what I think,” Michele explains. “It's just that I love the idea that I can be surprised by the personality of someone else. It's nice to play with your life, to play with codes. I think that the era of being masculine only if you have a specific suit—it's over. Completely over. Also, women need men who are more connected with a woman's world.”
It's this openness to explore every corner of the fashion world that has made Michele's tenure at Gucci so exciting to watch. Over the first five years of his leadership, Gucci's business was a fast-growing juggernaut. “I think the more [the garments and accessories] are special, the more they will be salable,” he says. “When I talk about the collection and I show it to the merchandising department, they understand that fashion must be something unique. The era that you just want to buy a black pair of trousers without reason is over. Fashion can really talk to you. It's not just buying something, it's connecting to a strong image that suggests something to you. I know that is very complicated.” Michele laughs. “And it's not always easy to explain in English, but I always try to be sincere with my position.”
The image Gucci champions, in the end, isn't one image at all. Michele has held a mirror up to our world, reflecting the tension, the sexuality, the fragility of being a man in modern times back to us with passion, rigor, symbolism, and love. As you move, the Gucci reflection of you moves too. As the world changes, Michele adapts.
Steff Yotka is the fashion news editor at ‘Vogue.’
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2019 issue with the title "How Gucci Designer Alessandro Michele Kick-Started Fashion's Genderless Revolution."
Originally Appeared on GQ
