There was a faint air of Suspiria or Twin Peaks to the red, hazy space and velvet curtain backdrop that greeted us at Gucci yesterday. It also felt a bit like being inside a cloud of Tom Ford-era, pinkish red-bottled Gucci Rush - a weird kind of seedy sexiness that reverberated through the collection, where Alessandro Michele’s palazzo aesthetic - with all its dreamy florals, tapestries and precious embroidery - was laced with a heightened sense of the geeky codes that run alongside his delicate beauty. 

Michele is continuing to establish his romantic language but bringing in new and unexpected things, like Snoopy prints (a nice boyish touch), teddy bear graphics and Amish hats, as well as a subtext of good taste-bad taste, in Texan fringing and a Wild at Heart-esque snakeskin suit. Backstage he spoke of wanting to stay in “this kind of in-between in fashion. I don’t want a space. I prefer to float.”

After the show when we caught up with a rosy-cheeked Hari Nef, the model and actress starring in Amazon’s Transparent who had made her Gucci runway debut moments earlier, she echoed this, speaking of how she loves the fact that Michele sees “characters and people rather than labels and discourses that people in fashion seem to be talking about right now. He doesn’t see any of that.” What Michele seems to care about is a world of poetry for dreamers, and he noted that clothes are almost a psychological extension of your mind. His romantic sensibility particularly came across in the beauty of a crumpled, lived-in silk shirt. After all, dreaming wins over ironing any day. 

Watch Gucci’s AW16 menswear show below: