All of the LIGHTS

Looking to the stars for inspiration, Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele draws connections between a cosmic array of historical references for Cosmogonie Gucci.

- KELLY KHUA

Between a planetarium and a private library lies the philosopher who examines the metaphysical by assembling a network of quotations. Such was the life of German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin when he theorised constellation thinking, a concept that influenced creative director Alessandro Michele’s Cruise 2023 collection, Cosmogonie Gucci.

The inspiration behind this was Benjamin’s ability to “discover quotations from the depths of the sea” and bring them back “to the surface of the water as rare and precious pearls” by reassemblage. In his show notes, Michele wrote: “What can seem, at first sight, atomised and dispersed, like the stars in the sky, through Benjamin’s eyes becomes an assembly of complicity: a connective structure that lights up the darkness through the epiphany of a constellation.”