For his mid-season Gucci collection, titled Cosmogonie, designer Alessandro Michele turned to philosophy and the stars for inspiration. The show was held at Puglia’s 13th century Castel Del Monte, which features an octagonal shape with a mathematical and astronomical layout.
“Benjamin, after all, is a collector of quotations,” Michele wrote in his show notes. “He discovers them from the depths of the sea, and he brings them back to the surface of the water as rare and precious pearls. He reassembles them like shreds of thoughts that need to be recomposed, reconstructed, updated.”
Michele uses a similar technique when producing his collections, often stitching unexpected fabrics to each other and finishing them off with historical references. For this show, the designer produced a co-ed offering that focused on an evening-ready moody aesthetic.
Some of the best looks of the night featured a head-to-toe grained black leather trench coat and trouser combination, finished off with steel toe-capped boots. Models cascaded around the castle wearing sequins embraided on medieval gowns, followed by denim, pearls, ruff, and glittering capes. The looks were elevated with medieval accessories that included gladiator shoes, latex gloves, laced-up stiletto boots, platform sandals, and woven handbags. Jewellery and furnishing added that shimmering touch to the collection – the diamond-encrusted nose chains, and the chandeliers which were coated with denim pieces, bringing together tensions of worlds often found in Benjamin’s writing.
“The constellation for Benjamin is a sudden apparition, full of tensions,” wrote Michele in his notes. “It is what comes out of the capacity to draw conjunctions between fragments of worlds which would be otherwise dispersed: a feverish dust of quotations that burns in the possibility of a contact.”
