All Hail The King

For Alessandro Michele, the creative force behind Gucci’s resurgence, it’s all about the beauty – and giving the people what they want

- Richard Clune

"You are not here.” It’s an inauspicious start to our Milanese date with Gucci’s new maestro, Alessandro Michele. “Sir, I can state again that you are not here.”

And so he does, the burly, black-clad bouncer whose angular physicality suggests Eastern European over Italian, firmly reiterating the error made, that this is not our point of entry. Not today.

It seems the heavy tint and lithe, low-slung lines of the Audi that’s ferried us to Gucci’s so-called Hub, on the industrial outskirts of the city, is to blame, passing an initial checkpoint, the first means of division that we were waved through, and arriving at the velvet rope apparently not meant for us.

Further along we shuffle, to attach to other members of the general public and a moving queue that arrives at a lengthy courtyard informing but a minor piece of Gucci’s recently opened HQ – a dramatic 35,000sqm plot of functional, squared buildings of glass and brick and open space on a site that once housed Caproni Aeronautics.

Our stuttering debut is made all the more amusing on eagerly waving back to a familiar face across the growing crowd, a child-like display of excited expressiveness and flapping... Only to realise his gesturing is actually for the attractive blonde standing directly behind. We smile back.

No cigarettes allowed. Not here, beyond the rope, within the sanctum. Filthy habit, anyway. And so, instead, we take in Alexa Chung – looking surprised, as she does, not a striped Michael Kors top in sight.

The overachieving Brit “It” stares down the multiple phone cameras of kids who’ll have likely spoken about themselves, without hesitation or remorse, in the third person at some point during the previous 24 hours. Today, they’ll immediately post their captures to the millions of followers they apparently have.