Let’s rewind the tape. How did the idea of writing this book come about?
«Alessandro had been imagining writing a book for some time and wanted to do it with a philosopher. As we also tell in the pages, every one of his fashion shows, since he became creative director of Gucci, has been accompanied by micro treatises on philosophy. So for him, giving life to a book of this kind meant doing a bit of the same type of operation.”
Alessandro Michele
©Fabio Lovino
How did you set up the work and construct the narrative?
«Conversing a lot. We started talking remotely during the Covid period as we couldn’t meet. For a long time we had long dialogue sessions which we then recorded. From here, then, the book was born which is the result of a series of intense conversations, also held live as soon as there was the possibility.”
Yours is a treatise on fashion and philosophy. How do these two apparently distant worlds meet?
«They are not far away. Since Alessandro started designing collections for Gucci, he introduced a different practice to the world of fashion. The press release was no longer a simple didactic comment on the collection, but a true philosophical reflection. The first, for example, was an investigation into the meaning of being contemporary. It began with a quote from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and ended with one from Roland Barthes, suggesting how, to be contemporary it is not necessary to deny the past, but only to have a free relationship with one’s past. But we could also mention the reflection on friendship and constellations starting from the relationship between Walter Benjamin and Hanna Arendt for the show in Puglia, or that for the fashion show, perhaps among the most famous, Cyborg, which had clear references to Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault. He has always carried forward the idea that the most suitable language for talking about fashion is that of philosophy. On the one hand because it is a way to claim a complexity that society in general does not recognize in fashion, on the other because, in addition to prejudices linked to sexism and ignorance, there is a problem of basic knowledge, of history itself , for which, in part, fashion houses are also responsible.”
With the Pierpaolo Piccioli era over, the Valentino fashion house looks to the future. Or rather, to the present. And in the new here and now he is there: Alessandro Michele, the former creative director of Gucci, who with his bombastic stylistic signature had contributed to making the Florentine brand one of the most desired in the world
Arrow
That is to say?
«Because in fact they don’t open their archives and it’s complicated to make history if you can’t know, for example, which looks Margiela showed in his first ten fashion shows. The responsibility is somewhat shared, it is not just the company’s. The big fashion houses are now discovering the value of their archive, but they treat it as a commercial asset and not so much as a historical asset, as a heritage that belongs to humanity. It’s a misunderstanding they can’t shake. Just like the word that circulates within these large houses which is completely classified. There is a very strange relationship with creation by these great empires that is completely different from that of other artistic disciplines or large galleries. Imagine if Hauser & Wirth secreted the entire archive of one of its greatest artists due to the risk that it might be copied! There is a fundamental misunderstanding.”
Which?
«Fashion is not what customs became in the twentieth century. When the great artistic avant-gardes dictated that the program of art should coincide with life, there was already an artistic artifact that by nature is close to everyone, that everyone carries, and they carry it on the surface of their skin throughout the day, or the dress. Fashion is the avant-garde of the artistic avant-gardes because it is a kind of Trojan horse that allows art to stay on the skin of anyone’s bodies. It was at the beginning of the 20th century that the great transfiguration of that space initially used for other reasons – the costume had to signal social and economic distances – began, into a place through which artists, but in reality anyone, claimed freedom and the ability to give shape. It is both a kind of explosion and universalization of art, but also of art becoming a kind of metaphysical operation on oneself, which means deciding what we are, that we are no longer what we were yesterday, etc. For this reason philosophy, or the thought of how the world works, should have approached fashion much earlier.”
