“I thought the castle shouldn’t be kept shrouded in silence, but had to be lived and celebrated as it probably was when it was built, a sort of California, the Silicon Valley of the time.” Under a serendipitous full moon, his constellation of characters paraded around the fortress, lit by projections of stars and galaxies. Michele’s journey this season manifested in a show intended “as a rave,” he explained, where his skills as a costume designer were boosted by the theatricality exuded by the location. It’s like being at sea, in the ocean, and casting out someone or something is not being fair to the complexity of life.” It’s about life, it speaks a multitude of idioms, it’s like a huge choir from which nobody has to be excluded. Fashion isn’t just a hieroglyph that only élites can understand. Putting together a collection has to do with talking about your idea of the world, because fashion is deeply connected to life and to humanity. “Today, ‘making fashion’ doesn’t mean just being a tailor, or chronicling just a one-dimensional narration. “Clothes are mediums, strata of languages,” he said. Michele has often built on the tension and vitality of the past to write his own version of the present. The idea of “cosmogonies of constellations” was born after a reading of German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s essay on Walter Benjamin, whose library was confiscated by the Gestapo, leaving him unable to access to the eclectic network of other people’s thoughts that nurtured his entire oeuvre. While widely Instagram-compelling and immediate, they’re often substantiated by high-falutin, erudite citations. Michele’s collections seem to be part of a complex, well orchestrated flux of consciousness, gelled into attractive visual dénouements. It goes without saying that Michele was drawn to the genius loci of this rather extraordinary setting. In the castle’s construction, the number eight was obsessively repeated as an arcane bearer of meaning. A majestic fortress in the shape of an octagonal turreted crown smack in the middle of Puglia’s flat countryside, it was built around the thirteenth century by the emperor Frederick II, a maverick monarch-poet, polyglot, mathematician, and magician-who presided over a sophisticated multicultural court of astronomers, artists, and warriors. But as far as magical thinking goes, Castel del Monte, where he choose to show his resort, surely upstages his previous settings. Not surprisingly, he called his resort collection Cosmogonies.Īt Gucci, Michele has brought his collections to places of esoteric, disquieting charm-the Promenade des Alycamps in Arles, an ancient necropolis, or Rome’s Musei Capitolini overlooking the Fori Imperiali, where archeological remains give off vibes of splendor and decay. His fascination for layered references and his love of history make him a collector of objects and memories, an archivist of galaxies of images. The collections he creates are prismatic affairs, as visually diverse as they are infused by meanings sometimes impervious to easy deciphering. Alessandro Michele’s line of reasoning has never been linear.
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