Dispatch from the Dream Factory

For Alessandro Michele, the decision to present his latest collection along Hollywood Boulevard was a matter of destiny – the perfect place to restart. Gucci Love Parade marked the House’s first in-person fashion show since February 2020 and Los Angeles represented a return: a return to the place he chose as the backdrop to his first campaign as Creative Director; a sentimental return to the pantheon that was portrayed to him by his mother as a dream factory.

“When I started thinking about the way I wanted to celebrate this new chapter in my adventurous job, I thought about mum and her precious legacy. I thought about the worship of beauty she fed me with. About the indefeasible gift of dreaming and the mythopoetic aura of cinema. This is why I chose Hollywood Boulevard,” he wrote in his notes on the collection.

The spirit of self-expression – that singularity from which the universe of Alessandro Michele burst into being – was the leitmotif of the collection; a reflection of Los Angeles and its embrace of the idea that when dressing up, there are no rules. Lace, sequins and pleats were paired with vertiginous platform heels and sex toys; tailored jackets were embellished with fake flowers and worn over leggings; cowboy hats and tropical prints were followed by elaborate Cleopatra-inspired headpieces in a “parade of enchanted and deeply free beings that go across a land where neither past nor future reside.”

Along the city’s iconic Walk of Fame in a meta mise-en-scène, yesteryear-inspired gowns swept over a procession of yesteryear’s stars, both literal and figurative. “Hollywood is, after all, a Greek temple populated by pagan divinities. Here actors and actresses are acknowledged as heroes of the myth: hybrid creatures with the power to hold divine transcendence and mortal existence at the same time, both the imaginary and the real. They are the idols of a new contemporary cosmogony, embodying a persistence of the sacred. Aphrodite, Theseus, Pandora and Medusa still live in Hollywood’s Olympus. Beyond reach, and yet, so human.