Gucci’s Renaissance Man

Alessandro Michele, the brand’s creative director, looks at modern fashion with a historical eye.
Michele in his office next to a brocaded chair that he found in an antique shop. His clothing designs reflect his...
Michele in his office, next to a brocaded chair that he found in an antique shop. His clothing designs reflect his curatorial eye.Photograph by Davide Monteleone for The New Yorker

Several years ago, Gucci, which started in Florence in the nineteen-twenties as a small leather-goods concern, moved its design headquarters to Rome, where it occupies a grand Renaissance building called the Palazzo Alberini-Cicciaporci. The palazzo was completed around 1520, following a plan ascribed to Raphael, and many art historians discern his touch in the elegantly geometric façade. Other aspects of the building have been attributed to his chief assistant, Giulio Romano, who worked in Raphael’s studio for years before going on to forge the new style of Mannerism.

The palazzo’s former chapel—a light-filled chamber with a coffered ceiling that is edged by newly restored frescoes—is now the office of Gucci’s creative director. Since January, 2015, this position has been held by Alessandro Michele, a forty-three-year-old native of Rome, who has worked at Gucci for fourteen years. Before his ascension, he was second-in-command at the company, overseeing its lucrative line of accessories.

When Michele took over the chapel-office, he did away with the sleek modernist couches that had been installed there, filling the space instead with his impressive collection of antiques. Empire chairs upholstered in golden brocade now rest on Oriental carpets. He brought in an enormous double desk from the nineteenth century, designed so that two people could work opposite each other. When I visited the office, in April, the desktop was stacked with beautiful old objects, from a gilded Roman-style wreath to a nineteenth-century English translation of the Decameron, published in the nineteen-thirties, with Art Nouveau woodcut illustrations. (Michele is reading it to polish his English.) Michele bought the desk at one of the many antique stores he frequents in Florence. “I was in love with this desk from the first time I saw it, but I didn’t have the space,” he told me. “When I got this office, I called the owners and said, ‘Now I have the space.’ ”

Michele’s predecessor, Frida Giannini, was the creative director for eight years, and during that period she and Patrizio di Marco, Gucci’s C.E.O., began a relationship and had a child. Near the end of her tenure, fashion critics grew bored with her clothes, many of which reworked themes that Gucci had been exploring since the nineties, when Tom Ford, the American designer, revitalized the brand with outré glamour. Sales fell, and in December, 2014, Giannini and di Marco were fired.

Michele, having labored for years in the Giulio Romano role—sublimating his creative vision in the service of another while quietly learning how the company worked—stepped into the Raphael position with aplomb. Within a week, he had overseen the design of an entirely new men’s collection, a foppish conception that was a decisive swerve from the bourgeois luxury of Giannini’s menswear designs (sweaters in muted colors, tasteful cashmere peacoats). Michele’s clothes would have pleased the earliest inhabitants of the Palazzo Alberini: a blouselike pink shirt fastened at the neck with a pussycat bow; mink-lined mules with horse-bit buckles. Michele gave the runway show of the collection a modern edge by presenting the garments on both male and female models. On January 21, 2015, two days after the show, Michele was officially promoted to creative director.

That February, he produced his first women’s collection, which was shown on a parade of wan models—some of them slightly funny-looking, many of them in nerdy glasses. The designs, like Michele’s antiques collection, suggested a voracious curatorial eye. One model wore a floral tea gown with furry slippers—a supple combination of thirties débutante and fifties housewife. A transparent peach-colored blouse with a ruffled neckline was boldly paired with a scarlet leather skirt. Michele was offering a startling miscellany inflected with a high-end vintage sensibility. Although he had invented the clothes, it was as if they had been culled from a thrift store to which centuries of Roman princesses had consigned their most extravagant castoffs.

“To be honest, I’m not looking so much to connect as to segue.”

The collection was initially greeted with warm, if guarded, curiosity. Vanessa Friedman, the Times critic, wrote, “It wasn’t Fashion, it was fashion; a parade of pieces with a nostalgic romance that could be plucked from a wardrobe, or plunked into one, with ease.” Within a few months, though, the fashion world had fully embraced Michele’s cluttered, retro sensibility. After Gucci’s Cruise collection was shown in New York in the summer of 2015, Nicole Phelps observed, in Vogue, “We all shoot the hell out of it, and, more critically, we want to wear it.” Adrian Joffe, the president of Comme des Garçons and of the high-fashion retail chain Dover Street Market, told me, “The whole spirit of it was a complete revolution, a deep change.” Most designers present a new set of looks each season, with the implication that last season’s clothes have fallen utterly out of style. Michele lightly tweaks his template from season to season. “Alessandro tells a story,” Joffe said.

Michele’s clothes are pretty but not overtly sexy. Although they have a youthful verve, he has a preference for long sleeves, high necklines, and below-the-knee skirts of the sort that can also flatter grown women. In the twelve collections that he has presented so far, he has not isolated a single silhouette and made it his signature, nor has he mined a single historical period. Rather, his clothes reflect a broad study of costume and, in particular, of the ways adornment and embellishment have been used over centuries. Instead of making references to the movies or photography—common inspirational recourses for contemporary designers—Michele’s clothes are shaped by the decades he has spent exploring the flea markets, museums, and archives of European cities. A person who visits the eighteenth-century galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London, might pause before one opulent display—a two-hundred-and-eighty-year-old waistcoat in yellow satin, richly embroidered with full-blown flowers and feathered scrolls—and wonder just how long Michele has spent gazing at it, taking notes.

Michele’s approach to design can be almost comically cerebral. He has a fondness for issuing explanatory texts for his shows which allude to postmodernist philosophy—a tendency that reveals the influence of his partner, Giovanni Attili, a professor of urban planning who is well versed in critical theory. A note for a recent men’s collection cites Gilles Deleuze’s idea of “assemblage,” observing that Michele’s clothes “become an assemblage of fragments emerging from a temporal elsewhere: resurfacing epiphanies, entangled and unexpected.”

Immersed as Michele is in the “temporal elsewhere,” his clothes are firmly aligned with current cultural themes. The actor and model Hari Nef, who is transgender, appeared in the Fall 2016 men’s show. She told me, “There is nothing inherently subversive about a robin’s-egg-blue blouse with a black grosgrain ribbon that you tie in the front—but, when you put it on a skinny teen-age boy, there is something really sinister about that, and punk about that.” She went on, “Alessandro is placing these priceless garments that you can’t argue with in a very radical context. You are going home with this coat that you want to wear, and your mom wants to wear, and your grandma wants to wear—but that coat was shown on a boy, or it has a giant green snake on the back, and the inner lining of it is blood red. It is a little nasty and it is grotesque, but it’s beautiful.”

When I visited Rome, Michele was preparing this year’s Cruise collection, which was to be shown later in the spring, in London. In an alcove above his office desk, he had propped one of the inspirations for the collection: a small English painting, from the early seventeenth century, of a youthful figure of indeterminate gender, dressed in a ruff collar and a tomato-red jacket ornamented with gold stitching and buttons. The youth’s face was realistically rendered but the body was stylized, with awkwardly braced elbows. The figure held a prayer book that looked remarkably like an iPhone.

“It is a young guy who looks like a girl, because, at that time, until you were older, you were completely dressed like a girl,” Michele said. He has striking looks himself—long, thick dark hair and a heavy beard, like Christ as rendered by Leonardo, with a voluptuous mouth. He speaks excellent English, with the sort of colorful idiosyncrasies to be expected from someone who hones his grasp of the language by reading a nineteenth-century English translation of fourteenth-century Italian literature. He said of the painting, “The face, it’s softer, more real—like Italian Renaissance painting, but the body is still a very Northern European pose—it’s very flat. I prefer this to a lot of Italian painting, because it is more that you are inventing the character. It’s more unreal. The body is more like a sheet of paper.”

Michele is a connoisseur of English style, and a Gucci runway show was recently held at Westminster Abbey. “Westminster is exactly what I love about this culture,” Michele says.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for the New Yorker

Michele is a student of the portrait genre. “This painting is like a Polaroid,” he said. “It is a very pop way to show your personality.” Discussing the youth’s costume, he pointed out that similar sartorial tastes prevail in England today. “This dress is completely red. With Raphael or Titian, if you have someone in turquoise you have a piece of yellow, just to balance. But if you go to London you see that kind of old woman dressed all in red. She doesn’t care. If she loves jade green, she is completely jade green.” (A walk through the Royal Enclosure at Ascot will confirm this insight.) “It is something that doesn’t happen on the other side of Europe. We are more obsessed with, ‘If you have red shoes, you have to have something camel on top.’ ”

The painting in the alcove was a replica. The original, which Michele bought a few years ago, in London, hangs in his bedroom. He is interested in the way power was managed through image in England, particularly during the Tudor era. “It was a super cruel, and heavy, and dangerous period,” he said. “But they all looked completely sure about their power. They were less elegant, less soft, than Italian people.”

English modes of self-presentation have fascinated Michele since his youth. Growing up in the nineteen-eighties in Monte Sacro, on the outskirts of Rome, he began reading British magazines, and admired London’s post-punk, New Romantic street style. By his early teens, he had begun wearing drainpipe jeans and pointy shoes, and had cut and bleached his hair into a blond Mohawk. “The first time I went to London, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I was completely in love,” he said. “I was shocked by the way the English guys and girls dressed.” He roamed the market at Camden Lock, where antique dealers had stalls and independent fashion designers sold clothes. His first job at Gucci was in London, in the design department, and he lived there from 2002 to 2006. He was impressed by the style of Britons of all types. “The Queen is one of the most quirky people in the world,” he told me. “She is very inspiring. It is clear that she loves color.”

Michele’s study of English style had informed many of the pieces in the Cruise collection. By April, most of the designs had been completed, and I joined him as he looked over sample garments with members of his team. Michele is now the boss of his former colleagues, who have happily adopted the new house aesthetic. When we arrived in the studio, upstairs from his chapel-office, he complimented Katia Minniti, Gucci’s ready-to-wear fur and leather designer, on her bright-red socks, which were wrinkled around her ankles and worn with gold high-heeled sandals, a pleated skirt with a pink print, and a blue blouse. Michele was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, over which he wore a pale-blue bomber jacket; it had a paisley lining embroidered with his nickname, Lallo.

Propped against the walls were pushpin boards to which dozens of appliqué animals, insects, and birds had been affixed. Michele refers to this menagerie as the Gucci Garden, because many of the images draw on the brand’s heritage. There was a sequinned tiger, and a pair of embroidered cocker spaniels modelled on pottery figurines made in Staffordshire, England, in the nineteenth century. The dogs had been introduced into the garden by Michele. (He has an extensive collection of the figurines.) On a large table, there were boxes filled with ribbons, buttons, strips of lace, and other trims.

Models appeared in the new dresses. One gorgeous evening gown, in cinnamon-and-sapphire-colored silk woven with intricate patterns, had a dramatic scooped collar and a high neck. It simultaneously suggested the British Raj and the first Queen Elizabeth. Another dress, fashioned from translucent pink chiffon with a high neck and long sleeves, was demure and daringly revealing at the same time. “Bellissimo!” Michele exclaimed as he adjusted the collar and positioned black appliqué patches around the neck. At times, he can seem like a haberdasher with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“One of the themes is the Victorian Age,” Michele explained. Pink is one of his favorite colors, and he scours antique stores in London to look for evocative shades. One particularly Victorian design was a long ivory dress, whose sleeves alone might have served as the calling card for a seamstress seeking employment. I counted at least six different needlework techniques—including smocking, pin pleats, and rosettes—that descended from puffed shoulder to netting-frilled wrist.

Michele’s collections for Gucci offer a startling miscellany of styles inflected with a high-end vintage sensibility.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for the New Yorker

Adjusting the music that was emanating from the speaker of his iPhone—the Smiths—Michele got up from his seat to make more refinements. He snipped off a black velvet bow that was attached to a dress’s neckline and moved it a few inches down the breastbone. After examining a black-and-gold dress, he grabbed bits of black velvet and stiff tulle and improvised a pair of cap sleeves, creating a striking sculptural shape. Sometimes he took out his phone to snap a photograph of a detail. Michele has more than seventy-five thousand followers on Instagram, and his account is unusually esoteric. A closeup of his own feet inside black Mary Janes with silver snake buckles is intermixed with images of albino peacocks, Baroque sculptures, and seventeenth-century paintings. (In December, the Web site Fashionista declared, “Why the Hell Isn’t Everyone Following Alessandro Michele on Instagram?”)

In the studio, Michele’s manner was collaborative rather than imperious. After surveying the dresses, he and Davide Renne, the designer of the women’s ready-to-wear collection, sifted through bolts of fabric—a visual migraine of chinoiserie, psychedelia, and plaid—making selections for designs that had yet to be conceived. Michele admired a bright-green print featuring elephants, monkeys, and birds. Another fabric consisted of the Union Jack blotted with black silhouettes of parrots, like images from a Rorschach test. “For the Queen,” Michele said, with a smile.

There was a decent chance that the Queen might, in fact, become aware of Michele’s Cruise collection. Gucci had secured for its show the unlikely location of Westminster Abbey, which has been the site of every English coronation since 1066. This was the first time that the abbey would be hosting a fashion show. Even though Gucci would be occupying the cloister, rather than laying a runway along the length of the spectacular Gothic nave, the choice had made headlines in England when it was announced, in February.

“I was thinking to have a very significant place in London,” Michele told me over lunch. We were not far from the Palazzo Alberini, at a favorite restaurant that is owned by Katia Minniti, the Gucci designer. (She emerged from the kitchen as we were giving our order, still in red socks and gold heels. Michele recommended the pasta cacio e pepe, a Roman specialty, but ate tofu with vegetables.) He told me that he had first considered presenting the show in a Victorian building on Southampton Row that used to house the Central St. Martins school of art. During the nineties, his formative years, many important British designers had studied at the college. “I was thinking how great it would be for a brand like Gucci to show in the same school where Alexander McQueen finished his work, or John Galliano—there is still a soul in this place,” he said. “But after I had the opportunity of Westminster I said, ‘Westminster is exactly what I love about this culture.’ ”

The authorities at the abbey had been surprisingly permissive, he said, though they had sought assurance that his designs would not breach acceptable bounds of modesty. (So far, there had been no problems: for all his love of translucent fabrics, Michele’s clothes do not show a lot of unveiled flesh.) “Everything in England happened inside this church,” Michele went on. “I love church, and I love Gothic, and I love this kind of aesthetic, so it is kind of a dream to show in this place. One of the girls who works with me, she said, ‘Probably you will also want to ask for Buckingham Palace?’ I said, ‘No, I prefer Westminster.’ ”

As a child, Michele often visited the churches of Rome with his father, who was interested in historical art, and who also took him to galleries and museums. Although Michele is not religious, the habit of visiting places of worship has endured. “You can feel the power of the people who were inside to express themselves, or to ask for something,” he said. One of his favorite places in Rome is the Basilica di San Clemente, a twelfth-century structure with Byzantine-style mosaics. It was built over a fourth-century church that itself sat atop a temple to the Roman god Mithras. The historical layering has created a serendipitous aesthetic—and had informed Michele’s love of graceful juxtapositions. “It is beautiful how religion transforms from other cultures,” he said. “And I also love the Pantheon—in the center of this big, crazy city, a temple for all the gods.” The Pantheon’s cupola, with its apex open to the sky, is “like a big mother,” he said. “It hugs you, with the light inside. It is a very animistic idea of God. Sometimes when you get inside there you want to cry.”

Michele’s clothes are pretty but not overtly sexy. He has an affinity for long sleeves, high necklines, and below-the-knee skirts.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for the New Yorker

Michele’s father worked as a technician at Alitalia, but his passions lay elsewhere: he sculpted and wrote, and he felt a close tie to nature. This was the legacy of Michele’s paternal grandmother, who served as a kind of wise woman to her community, in the city of L’Aquila. “My father was a shaman,” Michele told me. “He told me that time doesn’t exist. He didn’t use a clock. He didn’t know when my birthday was. He would say, ‘You were born in the autumn—it was a hot autumn, it was the beginning of the seventies.’ He told me that if you try to stop with the idea that time exists you will live forever. I said to him, ‘How can I do it? I need to make appointments.’ But he was always late for things, because he didn’t care about appointments. So I think he was quite ready for his appointment with death.” He died a decade ago. Michele recalls, “He said to me, ‘You and I are very lucky, because we spent a lot of beautiful seasons together, and they are so many that I can’t remember how many they are.’ ”

Michele’s mother, who is also deceased, was more urbane. She worked as an assistant to a movie executive, and her sense of style was influenced by Hollywood. “She had this beautiful blond hair,” he said. “Fake blond—she’s Italian.” He went on, “I think I am completely the mix of both of them. I am obsessed with fashion, like my mother, and I am obsessed with art, like my father. I have something inside of me that every day tells me that nature and beauty is the soul, the meaning, of our life. And I also love Hollywood and cinema.” In February, Michele attended the Academy Awards, at the invitation of Jared Leto, who was recently appointed a brand ambassador for the fragrance Gucci Guilty.

A few months later, on a steamy June evening in New York, Michele was honored at the American fashion industry’s equivalent of the Oscars: the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. The ceremony took place at the Hammerstein Ballroom, on West Thirty-fourth Street. A red carpet had been set up along the sidewalk, and as the cocktail hour got under way designers and celebrities lined up to take their turn before the ranks of hollering photographers. Hari Nef wore a peppermint-green tulle gown with a glittering appliqué panther on the bosom; Gia Coppola, another Gucci devotee, was in a long dress confected of black netting embellished with red and pink sequins. Lena Dunham embraced Michele and complimented him on his cologne. Even his fragrance is antique: it was created in 1828 by the Florentine apothecary Santa Maria Novella.

Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, wore a Gucci design: a sleeveless ivory column, in satin duchesse, embroidered with birds and flowers. She presented Michele with the International Award, declaring that he “has helped us dream more freely.” Michele ascended to the stage, his head slightly bowed. “I am quite nervous,” he said, clutching the award between fingers laden with vintage rings. “I would never have guessed that I would be given an award for doing the job that I love, and for my creativity.” The humility of his manner was in direct contradiction to the flamboyance of his dusty-pink silk tuxedo, which suggested a dandy who had run off to join the Hells Angels. On the back of the jacket, pearl beads formed the image of a coiled snake.

When Michele first became interested in fashion, as a teen-ager, his impulse was to go into costume design. After high school, he enrolled in the Accademia di Costume e di Moda, in Rome. “I think that I still work like a costume designer,” he said. “I try to put some soul in the outfit—the idea of a character.” Upon graduating, though, he began working for an Italian knitwear company in Bologna. He then returned to Rome, to work at Fendi, where he met Frida Giannini, who was designing handbags. In 2002, Giannini was hired by Gucci. She moved to the company’s design offices in London, and took Michele with her.

The company had evolved significantly in the eighty years since Guccio Gucci opened his Florence shop. In the nineteen-twenties, Gucci sold luggage of the sort that Guccio had observed being used by guests at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he had worked as a young man. As Sara G. Forden relates, in “The House of Gucci” (2000), in the mid-thirties countries in the League of Nations protested Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia by imposing sanctions against Italian industry; Gucci, facing a leather shortage, was forced to innovate. The company began making fabric handbags with spare amounts of leather trim. It developed its signature diamond print and incorporated materials such as raffia and wicker into its designs. The new designs were very popular, and in 1938 Gucci opened a luxuriously appointed boutique on Via Condotti, in Rome. By the fifties, when it added its first New York store, the company had become a status symbol for royalty and celebrities, including Elizabeth II, Grace Kelly, and the future Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Michele’s clothes are shaped by the decades he has spent exploring the flea markets, museums, and archives of European cities. June, 2016.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for the New Yorker

But by the eighties Gucci had gone into decline, having become a predictable standby of the duty-free store. (Its horse-bit loafers were part of the Washington lobbyist’s uniform.) Seeking to revive the brand, Maurizio Gucci, then the company’s chairman, lured away Dawn Mello, an executive at Bergdorf Goodman. In 1990, Mello hired Tom Ford, then a little-known designer at Perry Ellis, to create Gucci’s first ready-to-wear collection for women. When Mello left the company to return to Bergdorf Goodman, as president, four years later, Ford became Gucci’s creative director.

Ford gave Gucci a radical makeover, emphasizing slinky, bias-cut gowns, in black or white jersey, that featured plunging necklines, cutouts at the hip, and buckled waists. His designs evoked the louche allure of Studio 54 in the disco era. Ford, who grew up in New Mexico, and attended N.Y.U. and the Parsons School of Design, had a peculiarly American attachment to ideas of European sophistication. In 1996, he proclaimed, to the Times Magazine, “Too much style in America is tacky. It’s looked down upon to be too stylish.”

Ford’s ostentatiously sexy designs had a broad influence. If, twenty years ago, you lived in narrow, low-waisted pants with a leg-lengthening flare at the calf, that was Tom Ford’s gift to you. Michele has a very different sensibility, but he admires Ford’s conjuring of the sartorial past. “I feel myself very close to Tom,” Michele told me. “He didn’t have another Faye Dunaway, or another Lauren Hutton, or another Bianca Jagger, but he wanted to create the illusion that they are still around us. He tried to make, in that time, something that didn’t exist anymore.”

Sales initially surged under Ford, and Gucci once again became a formidable brand. In 1999, the company was acquired by Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, a French conglomerate. Luxury sales slumped after September, 2001, and in the early aughts Ford seemed, at times, to be losing his touch. (The Times decried “silly affairs involving cursive logos” and “too much fur.”) Ford and Domenico De Sole, Gucci’s C.E.O., were soon at loggerheads with their corporate parent, and in 2004 they exited the company. Ford’s post was split among three designers, including Giannini; two years later, she was appointed sole creative director, and Michele became her No. 2. “I did a lot of huge and beautiful bags,” Michele told me of this period. “I don’t have a problem to say I am a good merchandiser, because I love objects.” But the job was not a venue for self-expression. “I was not creative—I was more executive,” he said. “My job was to more or less work quite exactly from the idea of another person. I didn’t have freedom. I just put in ten per cent of my creativity.”

When Giannini was fired, the fashion press bruited about many names as possible successors, including Riccardo Tisci, who had revitalized Givenchy, and Hedi Slimane, of Yves Saint Laurent. In some quarters, there were calls for a restoration of Tom Ford, who had gone on to establish his own label, and to direct movies. It was suggested to Marco Bizzarri, Gucci’s new president and C.E.O., that he should talk to Michele, whose long standing at the company might be useful in informing the search. “It was unplanned,” Bizzarri told me in London this spring. “Someone said to call him. They said, ‘He’s a good guy.’ ” The two met, and talked for hours. “I didn’t have the mind to appoint him,” Bizzarri recalled. “But when I was listening to him I really understood that he is Gucci. He has been living the brand for many years, understanding the history. He is more Gucci than anybody else.”

In the show at Westminster Abbey, the models walked across the flat tombstones of departed pre-Reformation monks. In this costume-drama context, Michele’s vision looked more familiar, if hardly less peculiar. June, 2016.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for the New Yorker

Michele’s collections have highlighted his knowledge of Gucci’s past. A dress in delicate grass-green lace with a frilled plunging neckline has a ribbed waistband in the brand’s signature red-and-green stripe. The famous double-G motif proliferates on belt buckles and handbag prints, including one that Michele collaborated on with Trevor Andrew, a graffiti artist who goes by the name GucciGhost. Alexandra Shulman, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, told me, “When I saw the first women’s collection, in all honesty, I thought it looked a bit too vintage. There weren’t that many accessories—I couldn’t quite understand how that could be Gucci. But the way that he has taken the core of that idea, and in such a short time has made it what we think of as Gucci, is extraordinary.” Since Michele’s appointment, revenues at Gucci have risen: in the fourth quarter of 2015, sales were up thirteen per cent from the fourth quarter of 2014. Last fall, Bizzarri announced that, in defiance of retail convention, Gucci would not mark down prices, so that a Gucci garment bought at the start of the season would not lose its value when Black Friday dawned. François-Henri Pinault, the C.E.O. of Kering, as Gucci’s parent company is now known, told me, “When you look for a designer, you need someone who really understands the brand, and loves the brand. When you realize that what the designer is proposing is his own life, and his own creativity—it is not something that he does for the brand, but it’s his own personality—it’s very rare.”

For their initial conversation about the future of Gucci, Bizzarri visited Michele in the apartment that Michele shares with Giovanni Attili. It is a tiny, obsessively curated space at the top of a building that overlooks a square not far from the Palazzo Alberini. The front door opens into a small wood-panelled library that feels like a Renaissance studiolo. The living-room floorboards are laid in a herringbone pattern; a marble fireplace has a mantel decorated with taxidermied birds, a gilt clock, an ornate porcelain candlestick, and other objects from Michele’s antique-store forays. A wall behind a couch is hung with dozens of objects: a pair of Baroque angels in plaster, mounted sets of antlers. An antique cradle from India sits under the window—it serves as a bed for Michele’s two pugs. In a narrow dining room, a farmhouse table stands under an enormous gilt mirror from the early nineteenth century; when I went to the apartment, Michele told me that the mirror had been deaccessioned from the Palazzo Pamphili, which was built for Pope Innocent X. In Michele’s bedroom, concealed behind panelled doors, is a large walk-in closet—the kind of place a child might explore if he or she wanted to escape Narnia, rather than clamber into it.

Michele has two nephews, who, he said, are scared of a lot of things in the apartment—an animal skull sits atop a dresser—though they are also helplessly fascinated. “If you think about art, art is about being made a little bit uncomfortable,” he said. “When you are a kid, you always want to be in touch with something that makes you feel not comfortable. I have a machine from the seventeen-hundreds to make curly hair. You put the tip of it in the fire, and you can travel with it. It is very like a torture object. But when my nephews arrive at my apartment, they say, ‘Please, can we see the machine to make curly hair?’ There is something about discovering different things—things that make you feel curious and uncomfortable—that is very human.”

June 2nd was the sixty-third anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. That day, at noon, bells from the northwest tower pealed for half an hour to mark the occasion. They resounded in the cloister below, where hundreds of Gucci staff and hired hands were readying the site for the fashion show, which was to take place at three. It was an unseasonably cold day, and a square of leaden sky loomed above the lush green lawn, edged by four Gothic passageways, through which the models were to parade. Two rows of benches had been set up for guests: no fashion critic would have to perch on the chilly stone perimeter that had served generations of monks. Each seat was marked by an emerald velvet cushion that had been embroidered with a snake, a monkey, or a bee from the Gucci Garden.

Michele was bundled against the cold in an off-white biker jacket covered in metal studs and embroidered with a cat’s face. Underneath the jacket, he wore a vivid green hoodie. “Look at my beautiful dressing room,” he said with a laugh, as he conducted me into the abbey’s Chapter House. An enormous octagonal space with huge stained-glass windows, medieval wall paintings, and a vaulted ceiling supported by one delicate central column, it was built by Henry III in the thirteenth century, and is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of English Gothic.

At the Gucci Cruise 2017 runway show, a model wears a black tulle gown embroidered with crystal snakes. Though one could mock the frippery, the show was disconcertingly lovely. Many outfits were covetable for their curiousness, like objects in a Wunderkammer. June, 2016.Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for the New Yorker

“I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my life,” Michele said. “It is like the Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris, but probably better, because of the shape. It is like an animal, like a plant.” Another medieval glory of the Chapter House—its floor of glazed tiles—had been covered with carpeting. Dozens of clothes racks held the outfits that Michele planned to present that afternoon. He walked among the racks, pausing to examine a dress made from lavish, multicolored Indian silk. Then he glanced up at the stained-glass windows, which were inlaid with images of British kings and queens. “Look at Elizabeth I, with the gorgiera—the collar—around her neck,” he said. “Beautiful.” Also circulating backstage was Giovanni Attili, who appeared to observe his partner’s occupation with a detached anthropological interest. He later told me, “Alessandro’s professional world is very different from mine. In this difference I find a source of nourishment. Not only is his imagination explosive and contagious—his grounded references always convey such meaningful suggestions to my work.” When not accompanying Michele, Attili spends months at a time in Canada, conducting research among the Dakelh and Haida peoples. He was toweringly tall and as immoderately bearded as Michele. “He’s Neptune,” Michele said, upon introducing Attili. “There is a sculpture in Piazza Navona—that is him.”

The guests arrived. Women wearing gauzy Gucci dresses shivered in the cold as they took their seats. Shortly after three, loudspeakers that had been set up around the cloister’s edge started playing a recording of the English folk song “Scarborough Fair,” as arranged for boy choristers. Floodlights illuminated the Gothic passageways. Then a cavalcade of nearly a hundred models emerged from the cloister, wearing studded heels or towering platform sneakers or fur-lined backless loafers. They walked along slippery flagstones that had been worn smooth over centuries of use, and stepped on the flat tombstones of departed pre-Reformation monks.

In this costume-drama context, Michele’s vision looked more familiar, if hardly less peculiar. A pleated blue silk skirt, patterned with flowers, was paired with a boxy jacket in the same fabric; the jacket was edged with blue-and-green grosgrain ribbon, and a bow in the shape of a chrysanthemum was pinned at the neck. A long skirt in paisley-patterned silk was worn with a jacquard bomber jacket and spiky metallic-blue ankle boots. There was a profusion of accessorizing: handbags, eyeglasses, jewelry. More than one model wore a silk scarf tied over her hair and under her chin—a practical style sometimes favored by the Queen.

For all the inspiration that Michele had taken from English style, the collection did not look especially British—though a slouchy Union Jack-patterned sweater was a clear homage to Vivienne Westwood, the British designer known for translating native English eccentricity into high fashion. Michele’s show was a fantasia that drew on ideas of Britishness while exploiting Italian luxury and craftsmanship. Occasionally, it seemed that his purpose was to render the models ridiculous, such as when he sent out some in platform sneakers with the kind of rainbow-colored soles that club kids wore in the nineties. At other moments, the plethora of bows, beads, and embroideries was irresistibly silly. Christina Binkley, of the Wall Street Journal, cheekily tweeted, “do it yourself @gucci resort17: Take your 6th grade togs, add iron-on heart and animal patches from @Etsy.”

Though one could mock all the frippery, the show was disconcertingly lovely. Many outfits were covetable for their curiousness, like objects in a Wunderkammer. There were gasps when a model walked down the passageway in a full-length mink coat inset with coiling snakes: mink cutouts that had been dyed red, black, and white. The seductiveness of Michele’s vision was signalled by a barely subdued clamor among the guests over the emerald seat cushions, which were to be taken home as gifts. Several guests attempted surreptitiously to switch the cat or rabbit they had been assigned for a more desirable snake.

“Forget paleontology—this is a huge discovery for cheerleading!”

The day after the show, I met Michele in a suite at the Savoy Hotel—the young Guccio Gucci’s training ground in luxury. Michele had retired in the early hours of the morning, having been up late dancing at a party held at 106 Piccadilly, a Georgian home that had once been a private club. Annie Lennox had made a surprise appearance, playing the piano. Michele was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, his hair flowing over his shoulders. In his ring-loaded fingers, he was clutching an iPhone case in the shape of a dragon—a gift from a fashion correspondent from Singapore, who had been using it for his own phone until Michele’s magpie eye alighted upon it during the interview.

“I am too old for this,” Michele said of the phone case. “But today I am sure I will be happy to go around the city with it.” He had work to do—the men’s ready-to-wear show would take place in a few weeks—but he hoped to steal some time to go to his favorite antique store, near Bond Street.

“I bought this there,” he said, extending his hand to point out an English funeral ring. It was backed by woven human hair and bore a tiny image of a skeleton holding what looked like a telescope. On the inside of the ring was a date: February, 1695. The person commemorated by the ring, Michele speculated, “was a soldier, or a sailor.” He asked me, “Is it not beautiful? I love that the English celebrate death.”

“‘Wolf! Wolf!’ He cried for a third time. But this time no one came, and the wolf ate the sheep, and the shepherd boy never got into any of the really good schools.”

Michele owns dozens of funeral rings, and he has posted images of some of them on Instagram. His private collections have become part of his public reimagining of Gucci. He told me that he did not regret the loss of privacy. “I feel that, as an artist, the big point is to share, and to let people think about what you are showing,” he said. “Sharing isn’t anything that scares me. My house, my life, my way to live, for me is kind of a masterpiece.”

As he went on, his observations sounded more and more like those of his father: “I take care about what I put in my life, because life is an illusion, you know. It’s real that we are on the Earth, but we don’t know for how long. The idea of tomorrow is an illusion. So I want to put this kind of illusion into my life.” Michele grasped for the right word in English to explain himself. “How do you say illudere? To ‘illuse’ myself? To make an illusion for myself?”

I replied that the closest word in English was “delusion,” but noted that it had negative connotations. Michele was surprised. “In Italian, we can say that beauty is something that you create—that you create the illusion of your life,” he said. “It is to believe in something that doesn’t exist, like a magician, or a wizard.” He went on, “I was thinking over the past few days that the purpose of fashion is to give an illusion. I think that everybody can create their masterpiece, if you build your life how you want it. Just to create that illusion of your life—this is beautiful.” ♦