Valentino has made the announcement we’ve all been waiting for: Alessandro Michele will become the new creative director of the Rome-based couture house.

Michele will step into the creative-head shoes of his friend Pierpaolo Piccioli, who existed the Rome-based house last Friday. The designer embarks on his new journey next Tuesday, according to an internal statement.

Alessandro Michele’s first Valentino collection will be for spring 2025, presented in September.

Following the Breadcrumbs of our Next Journey

I just visited Michele’s IG to follow any breadcrumbs he has left along the way, ones that tie to his then and now creative and spiritual considerations, since his November 2022 departure from Gucci.

Of course, the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ book was a must-add to AOC’s visual about Alessandro Michele’s new journey.

Accompanying his December 2022 Instagram post featuring the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’, the enormously talented and visionary creative shared the definition of ‘imagination’ as “the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.”

With Alessandro Michele stepping into the creative limelight once again, the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ means a great deal to me.

A close friend of Michele’s reached out to me in regard to my commentary on this post about rabbits and mushrooms — to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese zodiac. He offered an additional creative reference or two about other mushroom lovers, and I was left with the undeniable, intense impression that we are traveling on the same moonbeam; he wanted me to know that fact; and my assignment is to keep writing about rabbits, mushrooms, human history, the divine experience and our shared humanist principles.

Not until I reread those thoughts just now, do I see another breadcrumb around Alessandro’s late period months at Gucci and the Gucci business in China — including the drastic news from last week about the steep plunge in Gucci’s sales in China.

That’s a separate post, but I think that the Chinese government would have liked Michele’s final Gucci Chinese New Year campaign, with its timely message for the 2023 Year of the Rabbit.

Rabbits Are Rising for Mushroom Lovers

Gucci Lunar Year of the Rabbit 2023 Campaign by Max Siedentopf with Emma Pei, Ruiqi Jiang AOC Fashion

With the Gregorian calendar’s New Year’s Day upon us in hours, and the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Rabbit ringing in the Lunar New Year on January 22, 2023, Gucci releases a beautiful and without controversy campaign that celebrates two global cultures and also Easter 2023, coming on April 9.

Can we summarize by saying rabbits win — because the rabbit is considered to be the luckiest out of all 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac?

The rabbit symbolizes mercy, elegance, and beauty. People who are born in the year of the rabbit are calm and peaceful — unlike the daily terrorism of former US president Donald Trump; Elon Musk determined to banish progressives from Twitter; and Kanye West going “death con 3” on Jews.

Rabbits are not committed to the triumph of one group with the death of another one. They come from the “can’t we all get along school”.

Gratitude to Alessandro Michele

Thank you to perhaps the most soulful creative in fashion — Alessandro Michele, formerly of Gucci. I am certainly one of the people who only recently expressed my understanding of your vision and perspective.

But hey, Alessandro Michele, from one mushroom lover to another, do you know that there is new scientific focus — really thanks to Stella McCartney’s devotion to mushrooms in every aspect — that it’s a very real possibility that ‘magic mushrooms’ are the missing link in human evolution that caused the great leap [still not explained] from the prehuman brain to our own?

Now that is BIG, Alessandro Michele, and you might take up that truth crusade in your next act. ~ Anne