So here’s the thing about Alessandro Michele’s aesthetic, and by “aesthetic” I don’t just mean a visual style, a mere parade of fabrics and silhouettes, but rather the whole unwieldy and deeply referential tangle of his Gucci years (2015–2022), an aesthetic that, depending on who you ask, was either (a) a triumph of individualism against the tyranny of normcore minimalism or (b) the sartorial equivalent of an overstuffed Rococo armoire filled with heirloom brooches and your grandmother’s embroidery experiments. And either of those would be correct. Because Alessandro Michele did not do fashion the way fashion had been done for the past two decades; he did something closer to historical excavation, memory play, a fugue-state dream of all the world’s most esoteric thrift shops colliding in a kaleidoscopic hallucination of color, print, and vintage ephemera.
But let’s get specific. Michele’s Gucci was a magpie’s nest of time periods, cultural references, and an almost pathological love for the ornate. And we’re not talking your average “nod to the ’70s”—no, this was a full-on spiritual possession by the ghosts of bygone eras, an ecstatic communion with everything from Victorian dandies to ’90s club kids. Think: pussy-bow blouses paired with logo-covered puffer jackets, silk turbans nestled next to oversized geek-chic glasses, brocade suits worn unironically by bearded men who looked like they had just stepped out of an 1850s Parisian opium den. It was excess as ethos, camp as doctrine, and yet—somehow—it worked.
And why did it work? Because in the grand chess game of fashion, where trends typically shuffle between stark minimalism and lavish maximalism, Michele arrived at the perfect moment of cultural ennui. The world had spent years feasting on the quiet austerity of Phoebe Philo’s Céline (all clean lines and tasteful restraint), the rigidly athletic futurism of Balenciaga under Gvasalia, and the endless, hypnotic beige-ness of “elevated basics.” Then here comes Michele, draping his models in oversized fur coats over schoolboy shorts, layering prints that seemed to defy logic, throwing in Byzantine embroidery, ’80s grandma glasses, and medieval tapestry motifs, all at the same time, like some kind of aesthetic anarchist who’d spent too much time locked in a Florentine attic surrounded by relics of centuries past. And people—actual consumers with wallets—ate it up.
His genius (or his madness, depending on your tolerance for opulence) was his ability to make excess feel deeply personal. Whereas many designers create collections that feel like cool, distant art pieces meant to be admired from behind a velvet rope, Michele’s work had the frenzied intimacy of a flea market dig: every outfit looked like a secret waiting to be decoded. His clothes weren’t just clothes; they were archives of emotion, repositories of personal mythologies.
But, of course, fashion moves in cycles. And by 2022, even the most devoted acolytes of Michele’s grandiose vision were starting to feel the weight of all that ornamentation. Maybe the world was ready for another swing back toward discipline, toward sleek, pared-down luxury, toward a return to so-called “quiet luxury”—a term that would make Alessandro Michele, in all his Renaissance-meets-Studio-54 glory, recoil in horror.
Which leaves us with the ultimate question: Was Michele’s Gucci an aberration? A beautiful, indulgent fever dream destined to burn out? Or was it a necessary correction, a glorious intermission in an otherwise linear march toward the tyranny of tastefulness? The answer, as with most things in fashion (and life), is probably both.
But one thing’s for certain: no one, absolutely no one, will ever mistake Alessandro Michele for a minimalist.
