Alessandro Michele reworks reality in Exquisite Gucci Michele continues to lead the brand's advancement in the chaotic world of contemporary fashion

A magic mirror to remake reality - this is the metaphor used by Alessandro Michele to describe Gucci's FW22 collection that has just gone on stage in Milan. A metaphor that well represents the work done by the designer during seven years as creative director of a brand that, thanks to him, is perhaps now the most important in the world. The show, which took place in a hallucinatory room entirely covered with mirrors immersed in a pink halo, brought his dandies and romantic heroines to the runway, covering them with furs, silks, jewels - and with an increasingly bold and vibrant use of color. All of Gucci's stylistic features now become metaphors for the ways in which fashion constructs and reconstructs the identities of individuals. But the construction of identity is also about pop culture: this is the meaning of the collaboration adidasxGucci presented on the runway today - a collaboration that sees the brand's Three Stripes and its flower-shaped logo become a mirror of Gucci's style, as if to say that there is no aspect of the reality of fashion that the brand cannot make its own.

The radical freedom evoked by Michele with this collection has a hint of hedonism, of contentment but above all of a heady sense of freedom - the same evoked by the musical backdrop of 80s dance and melodramatic vìolini that seems to want to indulge in emotions and memories without any kind of remorse. Less transgressive than with his Los Angeles show, but even more anarchic in his manipulation of sartorial codes and the cultural meanings of clothes, Michele thus continues to lead Gucci's advance in the chaotic and dizzying world of contemporary fashion.