By defining fashion as “tiger’s leap into that which has gone before”, W. Benjamin evoked a temporality of fashion in opposition to Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s conceptions. If Chanel was more associated with the Baudelaireian model and Vetements with the Mallarméan model, let’s now see how the work of designer Alessandro Michele at Gucci can be perceived in Benjaminian terms.
Memory as novelty
Alessandro Michele to the newspaper Antidote on April 15, 2016. He expresses his relationship to time:
“About now… Now it’s life, it’s the moment we’re living, the moment we can touch. For me, contemporary… the future is now. I don’t want to talk about the future because I don’t care. There is no such thing. We can try to let the future develop now, in the moment we are living. As for the past, I am very inspired by the past, because I like the idea that memory is a novelty. It’s not easy, the memory… The memory is not really the past, it’s what we want to remember from the past. This is what we want to touch again, in order to give it a new life. The idea that two apparently “lifeless” fragments of the past can be taken and brought back to life is a chemical process. For example, Gucci is a brand with a past, but you can ignore it because Gucci is there too, now. We exist because of the past. So I try to let my memories give me an idea of that past again. I live now and I think the result of this chemical process is the “contemporary”.
Gucci’s artistic director refuses to think about the future. According to him, the role of the fashion designer cannot be to predict the future, insofar as this future would not really exist at the time of the creation of a collection. On the other hand, the past provides him with an inexhaustible source of inspiration. But it is not a question of transcribing a literal past, in other words a faithful and authentic past, but more of aiming at the cohabitation of several periods to precisely define the contemporary. He introduces a fundamental distinction between the notions of past and memory, memory being defined rather as an actualized past, as a past conjugated to the present. If Martin Margiela or Hedi Slimane could also work on this question, they remained rather literal in their work, Margiela striving for example in his Replica collection to copy old clothes as faithfully as possible or Hedi Slimane trying to reactivate certain silhouettes like that of past rock idols like David Bowie, Mick Jagger or Jimi Hendrix. Alessandro Michele, on the contrary, aims at an imaginary past devoid of any anchorage in reality, which he places under the notion of “memory”. Thus, he is indeed performing a “tiger’s leap” into the past (in the Benjaminian sense) to make sense of it in the present. It is no coincidence that his Fall 2016/2017 menswear collection directly quotes a passage from the philosopher: “The traces coming from the past are neither inert and petrified relics, nor simple objects to confine to a museum. They rather need to be read as sort of sparks able to set alight the fuse of the explosive material placed in what has already been (das Gewesene). Sparks able to build constellations rich with future in which past meets present”.
A node of anachronisms
Thus it is a question for Michele to think the whole of Gucci’s creative model around the juxtaposition of many timelines, giving way to a knot of anachronisms. In the first place, his collections tend to mix influences and styles from several decades. If the principle is recurrent, let’s mention the 2017 Resort collection where bleached skinhead jeans coexist with ballroom dresses from the 1970s, platform boots from the 1990s, or cat sweaters.
Similarly, the Resort 2020 collection is characterized by a succession of silhouettes composed of Mickey Mouse tank tops and oriental skirts, sweatpants from the 1990s, boiled wool suit trousers and collar shirts from the 1970s, or other capes inspired by the Roman army and men in toga.
The locations of Michele’s shows for Gucci also reflect the past. Abbey of Westminster (Resort 2017), Roman necropolis of the Alyscamps d’Arles (Resort 2019), Le Palace, a Parisian nightclub of the late 1970s (Spring 2019 Ready-to-wear), or Musei Capitolini of Rome (Resort 2020): the Italian designer strives to invest former historical sites to present his anachronistic collections.
The brand’s visual communication is also appropriate. The promotional video of the Pre-Fall 2017 collection presents us, for example, a fantasized Northern Soul dance floor from the late 1960s inspired by Malick Sidibé’s photographs, when the Autumn 2018 pre-collection pays “a tribute” to Parisian May 1968 protests in a video interspersed with anachronisms. This relationship to history and the juxtaposition of different temporalities is finally reflected in the opening of the “Gucci Garden” in 2018 inside the Palazzo della Mercanzia in Florence. Museographing the history of the brand created in 1921, the interest resides in its curatorial approach, which refuses to allow the chronological distribution of the clothes and combines periods and designers.
Refusing to synthesize the period and having no claim to contemporaneity, Alessandro Michele is the perfect illustration of Benjamin’s temporality. More broadly, he gives us the example of a creative model that largely relies on the past, unlike the Baudelaireian model of compromise and Mallarméan “presentism”. Which temporality model do you prefer? On which model would you base the creation of a fashion brand?
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