Written from Michele’s home in Rome throughout the past few months, these diary entries also announce a new beginning for the Italian brand
Just like many of us, Gucci’s Creative Director Alessandro Michele has been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Interestingly, the famed Italian fashion house has decided to share selected pages from Michele’s personal—as in, intimate and sincere—diary written in his home in Rome during the past few months.
In a series of online posts titled “Notes From The Silence,” the brand shares several entries from Michele’s personal diaries—and in one of them, he announces a new beginning for the brand. In particular, Gucci will now show just twice a year, presenting season-less collections. These are the highlights from Alessandro Michele’s notes from the silence:
Part One: We Turned Out To Be So Small
“After all, the tragedy we are living is providing new reflections,” explained Michele in an entry titled ‘We Turned Out To Be So Small.’ “We could never have imagined to feel so connected to life through a bond of trembling and heartbreaking tenderness. We could never have thought to reconnect, so deeply, with the fragility of our creatural destiny.”
Part Two: About What We Would Not Want To Be The Same As It Was
“Now that the devastation caught us unprepared, we have to think about what we would not want to be the same as it was,” Michele elaborated. “Because the greatest risk, for our tomorrow, is abdicating our responsibility for a true and necessary discontinuity. Our history is littered with crises that taught us nothing. With economic collapses and social devastations that were tackled by imposing the same recipes from which they originated. With wounds that were not able to regenerate our minds. With a mourning that we were not able to live in order to change ourselves and our relationships. This crisis represents a fundamental test for us all. It’s a test, because there is sorrow, exertion, danger.”
Part Three: The Motive Of A Choice
“The change I imagine involves the capacity to reconnect with the deepest reasons that inspired my entry into the fashion realm,” explained Michele in the diary titled ‘The Motive Of A Choice.’ “I feel the need to renew a bond, purifying the essential by getting rid of the unnecessary. I crave the authentic motive of a choice.”
Part Four: A New Creative Universe
“I am fully realizing though, that this possibility to tell cannot be constrained by the tyranny of speed,” Michele noted in the changes for the brand. “That is why I decided to build a new path, away from deadlines that the industry consolidated and, above all, away from an excessive performativity that today really has no raison d’être. It’s a foundational act, audacious but necessary, that aims at building a new creative universe.”
Part Five: The Sacred Power Of Producing Reverberations
“Therefore, I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call,” explained Michele regarding the changes. “We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story. Irregular, joyful and absolutely free chapters, which will be written blending rules and genres, feeding on new spaces, linguistic codes and communication platforms and beyond.”
Part Six: Community Of Purpose
“It’s my project: the art of extending the existence in the future. A plural future, where ‘we’ provides a foundation. A future that contains the hug that today we cannot give each other, but to which we will return with an expanded comprehension,” Michele elaborated.
Part Seven: In The Throes Of What Is Missing
“Now that we are still apart, my love for fashion burns. Our species, after all, is like that: we love like crazy in the throes of what is missing,” added Michele in the closing.
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