“Back then, we lived in a squat in the outskirts of Rome. I needed to be able to breathe. Those subversive tales helped me in piercing the grayness. That was my escape, my desertion. Down in that tiny speck in the world, HOLLYWOOD seemed a bright and shiny star. Nine letters dripping with desire.”
Alessandro Michele starts from his past and brings us all to a new dimension which says a lot about the hic and nunc, still winking at the future. At a first sight it seems he celebrates Hollywood sparkling greatness but getting closer to his references and sources of inspiration you realise it’s not just that, he celebrates his past, his mum, who used to work in the film industry as an assistant in a production company, and the way she fed him with stories about that dream factory. Indeed, it isn’t just about Hollywood but the idea of it, the indefeasible gift of dreaming and the mythopoetic aura of cinema. Once again, the Creative Director discourse masterfully melts past, present and future. “Hollywood is, after all, a Greek temple populated by pagan divinities”, which made Hollywood Boulevard the perfect backdrop for Gucci’s magic, where friends of the House such as Macaulay Culkin, Miranda July, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Jared Leto, to name a few, became idols of a new contemporary cosmogony where 1940s-meets-1970s tailoring, Gucci logo racy catsuits are juxtaposed to sharp cut blazers and floppy fabric corsages easily dialogue with that California ease twist.
“Los Angeles shines in its own magic, which is timeless; it’s a place that brushes the divinities, becoming a mythology of the possible.”
