Gucci’s Alessandro Michele lensed by Tierney Gearon as he stood overlooking Sullivan Canyon Park in Los Angeles for an interview in the May 2019 issue of Vogue US.

A year ago Gucci’s creative genius Alessandro Michele sat down with Hamish Bowles for an interview ‘Inside the Wild World of Gucci Michele’.

“I would love to stay in one place,” Michale expressed to Bowles. “but the studio is in your brain, it’s in your suitcase, because we are always traveling.”

“I don’t have the time to sketch accurately,” he explains, “because after four years I understood that I needed to be more concentrated on the creativity and the process: the stories that I’m telling, the experience of the clients in the store, the collection, the show—the music, the atmosphere. I spend a lot of time working on it all. I’m trying to be less obsessive,” he adds, “but that is really hard for a designer—there are a million pieces. In the beginning I was checking everything, but we are a huge company, and after two years I was dying and thinking I wanted to stop this job. It’s a beautiful job, but it’s dangerous because it’s something that can take everything from you. You can’t be just an image—you really need to be here to fight every day. I was reflecting that if your job becomes your prosthetic to make your life better, when you take it off, you will die. I don’t want that prosthetic. I want my life.”

Frank Bruni wrote an excellent feature on Alessandro Michele published in the Sydney Morning Herald in December 2018. Bruni interviewed the creative director in New York before the opening of the new Soho store.

[Michele’s Gucci] is engaged in a consistently spirited and occasionally profound conversation with the zeitgeist, drawing from it, adding to it and revolutionising fashion in the process. Young consumers plant their flags and sculpt their images on social media, so Gucci, under Michele, does too. They expand and even explode the old parameters around gender, sexual identity, race and nationality, and Michele takes that journey with them, even leads them on it, giving them a uniform for it, a visual vocabulary with which to express it. The emotional genius of what he has done is to affirm their searching. The commercial genius is to create totems for it and, in the process, democratise what we historically called "luxury goods", a phrase too haute and hoary for the party he's throwing.

Gucci Imagines A New Fashion System

Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, in Dec. 2019.Credit...Stephanie Gengotti for The New York Times

Against this backdrop of our peering into the creative mind and personality of Alessandro Michele, on Monday the creative director laid out a new path forward for Gucci, re-imagining major elements in the fashion system, a giant reconsideration in the wake of our new COVID-19 world.

The brand will reduce its fashion show schedule from five to two, waving bon voyage to cruise shows. The purveyor of gender fluidity wants to eliminate the distinction between men’s wear and women’s wear, as well as saying goodbye to shows inspired by seasons of fall/winter and spring/summer.

“We need new oxygen to allow this complex system to be reborn,” Mr. Michele said, speaking from his studio in Rome while pensively waving a large black fan. One way to do that, he said, is to reduce the show schedule, writes Vanessa Friedman Vanessa Friedman for The New York Times.

Saint Laurent, also owned by Kering, has also said it would drop out of the fashion show season, following its own schedule this year. By comparison, Gucci is committed to a permanent, deeply considered re-evaluation of the entire fashion system.

“I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call,” Mr. Michele wrote in his diary, excerpts from which, entitled “Notes from the Silence,” were teased on Gucci’s Instagram account.

Gucci Instagram message from Alessandro Michele.

Because of Gucci’s primary influence in today’s fashion system, the entire “four-week traveling circus that moves from New York to London to Milan and Paris every September-October and Februry-March,” may no longer be feasible, writes Friedman.

Alessandro Michele expressed that while in lockdown in Rome, he suddenly had “time — time I have never hbad before to think about my work, my creativity, our future, the future of the company.” He felt, he said, that under the previous unrelenting system, his “creativity was being jeopardized.”

AOC is tracking industry responses to the Gucci announcement:

Gucci abandons ‘worn-out ritual’ of fashion seasons as the industry looks inward’ CNN

Gucci Makes a Big Change. Will Fashion Follow? The Cut

Gucci to Depart Fashion Week and Rename Collections CR Fashion Book

Gucci plans “new path” with catwalk schedule reduced to twice a year Vogue Business

To Be Continued . . .