The Best of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci in Vogue

“I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat”
From Coat by —William Butler Yeats

Alessandro Michele… a name with seven musical syllables that belongs to a man who has made his mark on fashion history—and on Gucci—through collisions of arcana and contemporary culture. Michele is a Roman after all, and also a postmodernist who has an inherent understanding of how stimulating the simultaneous existence of past and present are (scroll Instagram if you doubt it), and how curating these interactions is a way of establishing or expressing one’s identity.

His designs for Gucci were, in some ways, tools for self-invention. The designer was trained in the cozy confines of the Accademia di Costume e di Moda in Rome, where there’s a focus on functionality and fantasy. Students preparing for work in the fashion industry must also study costume design, which requires knowledge of character building.

Michele’s Gucci was a juggernaut, but his wasn’t an overnight success story, and the label was better for it. Working at the company, he knew the house and he knew himself. “I was already grown-up when I became known to the fashion public. I was almost 42,” said Michele in a recent Vogue Italia story, “and I realized that you have to hold onto who you are and where you’re going: You have to love yourself a lot and you have to love what you do just as much. You also have to learn to say no a lot.” In doing just that, Michele encouraged the world to say a resounding “Yes” to Gucci. Here, affirmations of the designer’s talent from the pages of Vogue.