Gucci serves up a fashion history explosion at MFW

Alessandro Michele is a fashion intellectual. His Gucci show notes have cited philosophers who are a struggle to pronounce, let alone understand – past references have included Derrida, Agamben and Debord, while this season it was the renowned double act Deleuze and Guattari (authors of the brilliantly titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia) who enlightened his collection. For AW16, Michele was thinking about sign systems – put more simply, the codes contained in clothing. Think how one style of stripe seems definitively to belong to an American varsity jumper, while a black net veil says widowhood, a beret indicates French bohemianism, and a particular kind of shoulder silhouette belongs irrefutably to a Tudor jacket.

It was all these signs – and many, many more – that made up his newest runway offering. They were described by the show notes as “a score of suggestions that mingle, modify and refer to each other flowing through unpredictable correlations of sense” – it was a fashion history explosion, a cultural mishmash that borrowed and interpreted and twisted the expected into a thousand different directions. There were Holy Mountain hats combined with impossibly long crystal earrings, Elizabethan pearls paired with 60s mini dresses.

Then, there was the logomania. The logo is arguably the most important cultural sign of all, especially within fashion. It's a symbol which can contain a multitude of meanings – if authentic, it shows off wealth and taste by indicating an item’s ties to prestige, history and craftsmanship. If fake, it speaks of a desire to be seen as something the wearer is not. The Gucci logo is one of the most copied in the world, and for AW16 Michele embraced this reality, flirting with the line between the real and the counterfeit by enlisting New York artist Trouble Andrew – aka GucciGhost – to create his own bootleg pieces. Spraying the word ‘real’ above ‘Gucci’ and painting the logo onto skirts, it demonstrated Michele’s experimentalism, backing up the way he's widening the Gucci circle to include artists like Petra Collins (who walked the show) and Hari Nef – modern muses of both style and substance.

But, while Michele is an intellectual and though his collections are rife with erudite references, what he does isn’t alienating because it’s so visually arresting and ultimately covetable. Each season thus far in his reign at the Italian house, he has served up an intoxicating cocktail of colours, fabrics, prints and motifs that might have drawn initial reference from textbooks but have proven to be real-life successes: in just over a year, his florals and frills have achieved international renown both on runways and shop floors. Michele's cocktail is one that it appears many enjoy and – as evidenced by Gucci’s skyrocketing sale figures – buy into. And despite fashion's current see now, buy now fervour, they're even prepared to wait a season to get their hands on it.