Alessandro Michele Is Designing For Today's World

Since arriving at Gucci, Alessandro Michele has turned us on to his magically surreal vision of fashion. For all the flights of fancy, though, he’s Alessandro Michele is designing for today’s world.

- Hamish Bowles

Alessandro Michele’s office at the Gucci Hub in Milan resembles one of the many iterations of Auntie Mame’s Beekman Place drawing room. It’s a stylish retreat decorated in his signature neo-Romantic style, with Napoleon III chairs and lacquered furniture dotted over flowering rugs and terracotta tomette tiles, all of it embowered in a Chinese paper of flowers and the exotic birds that the designer—in an echo of his hippie father—calls his spirit animals.

“For me, it’s quite empty,” Michele notes drily. “Milan is more of a working place.”

The idiosyncratic sitting room nestles in a LEED Gold-certified complex carved from the workshops of the 1915 Caproni aeronautical factory into a 35,000sqm behemoth that is a testament not only to the brand’s strength and ambitions—Gucci enjoyed 45 percent sales growth in 2017, with US$7.1 billion in annual sales, and has doubled its revenue during the past four years— but to its creative director’s singularly potent aesthetic. The staff canteen looks like a Belle Epoque café, with its ebonized mahogany bar, crimson sofas, and tall damask-and-toile-covered screens, just as Gucci fragrance counters around the world resemble 19thcentury apothecary shops. The Hub’s cavernous reception areas, meanwhile, are decorated with tufted velvet bones and more of Michele’s beloved antique Aubusson rugs, which also manage to lend the brand’s international outposts the quirky look of the Roman antiquarian shops that the designer likes to scour for jewels and objects of curiosity to fill his portfolio of properties.