It's always tragicomically funny when a new designer arrives at the helm of a fashion house and everybody suddenly decides to jump on the bandwagon and starts praising him/her without actually waiting a bit longer and giving them time to develop their style.
Claiming somebody is a genius only to abandon them a few seasons later is indeed one of the main curses of the modern fashion industry and what makes this exercise tragicomic (tragic for the designer, comical and silly when you think about the people involved in the industry who keep on doing it...). Somehow you have a feeling that this is precisely what's happening to Alessandro Michele at Gucci.
Since Frida Giannini's hastily exit in January, Michele has worked on two advertising campaigns and sent out two womenswear collections (menswear will soon follow...).
While he brought a much-needed change at the historical fashion house, his current trademark style – rechristened as retro, aunt, granny (for further references to this style see also Tim Walker's Granny's Alphabet) or librarian chic – remains for the time being a clever exercise in vintage styling and a pastiche of what we may have seen in the last few years on the runways at Prada, Miu Miu, Chanel and Valentino (under Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli) or in a Wes Anderson film.
While time will tell us if Michele is up for the challenge, there is one interesting point to make about some of the designs for his second women's ready-to-wear collection, Gucci's Resort 2016.
Showcased last week in New York (West 22nd Street was closed for the occasion and guests were flown in from all over the world – perfect tricks the industry uses to project an aura of glamorous grandeur on the media...), the collection featured pleated skirt suits, romantic lace dresses, chevron-striped long-sleeved designs, lamé separates, suede jackets that looked a bit too derivative of Miu Miu's Spring/Summer 2014 retro collection (View this photo) and mink coats characterised by intarsia motifs in bright colours, at times reminiscent of the fur pieces seen in Prada's Spring/Summer 2013 collection (View this photo), at others embellished with oversized dragonflies.
While these designs made you immediately think about Prada's obsession with a bored and beautiful bourgeoisie, woollen berets, pom-pom hats and nerd glasses added new clues. You could maybe meet people wearing these sort of thrown-together (maybe a modern reinterpretation of Missoni's "put together") vintage and retro looks in a library, reading a geek magazine on innovative DIY technologies in a cafe or maybe in a museum.
The latter is probably the best place to look for the origins of certain inspirations in contemporary collections.
Michele stated in recent interviews that he is obsessed with a decorative style reinterpreted in a modernly eccentric way and, while analysing more carefully his models who look like ordinary girls who may have spent a lot of time searching for (and finding) cool bargains in vintage shops, you realise that - rather than looking at Gucci's archives - the designer may have actually delved into museum archives (which is not a bad thing and could maybe take to a more intellectual level a label that, especially under Tom Ford, has been more or less identified with one main value - sex).
One particularly decorative flourish, a flamboyant tiger image on dresses, tops and skirts, rather than referencing the house's archives (though the tiger was already used by Gucci, also in more recent designs such as the sandals from the S/S 12 collection View this photo), echoed an iconic object from the Victoria & Albert Museum collections, "Tipu's Tiger", the semi-automaton representing a tiger devouring a prostrate European (mind you, designers borrowing from museum collections are not a new thing).
Artefacts with dragonflies (like the 18th century Japanese porcelain inro - or box - with a lacquer relief from the V&A collections at the end of this post) are also rather common in museum collections. The insects have indeed a wide and varied perception in different countries and amongst various civilizations, symbolising among the other things late Summer and early Autumn, courage, strength, and marital success.
It will be interesting to see if Michele will achieve global success instead and how he will develop his own style, especially under all the new pressures and expectations from critics and customers (not to mention meeting sales targets...). It will be even more fascinating to see in which ways this decorative eccentric trend will develop in the next seasons and if it will bring to our collective attention less casual and more precise links with specific artefacts in museum collections.
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