The Gucci Garden Of Delights, Starring Lawrence Wong

As I write this piece, the dust from the news that Gucci would be parting ways with creative director Alessandro Michele has already settled. The announcement that Michele’s journey of more than 20 years with the House had come to an end was made on 24 November 2022, and it shook the fashion industry to its core. 

Related article: Alessandro Michele Will Leave Gucci

In the seven years since Michele took on the mantle of Creative Director in 2015, he has made Gucci a byword for new luxury, where eclecticism and eccentricity is celebrated; where self-expression is king; where inclusivity, diversity, and love above all, represent its values. His creative vision turned Gucci into one of the world’s most highly desired brands, contributing 55 percent of the Kering Group’s €17.6 billion (S$25.3 billion) revenue in 2021—an impressive figure no doubt but not quite enough, it seems. 

No one had any inkling during the press conference for the Gucci Garden Archetypes exhibition in Sydney, its seventh global stop after Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul. Featuring eight rooms and one iconoclastic genius, the immersive exhibition lets you step inside some of the House’s most exciting advertising campaigns. Michele gave one of his last interviews to a room full of journalists in Sydney via a live video link. None of us knew it at the time, and if Michele did, he did not show it. Perhaps the only indicator, if any, was his sombre mood and quiet demeanour which he attributed to a bad cold. Seated on a royal blue Chesterfield sofa in a room filled with antiquities, he gave thoughtful and philosophical responses about the exhibition’s objectives. “This exhibition is explicit and fashion itself is extremely explicit,” he said. “And by explicit, I mean that fashion can truly and immediately communicate something in a very straightforward way.” 

Archivio Personale, the design studio which has transformed Alessandro Michele’s vision into narrative spaces, created a series of distinct, immersive installations in Sydney’s Powerhouse Ultimo museum, using cutting-edge technology, elaborate hand-crafting and innovative interior design. The first walkway, a graffiti-splattered passage, is a recreation of his pre-fall 2018 campaign, a homage to the Parisian student protests of May 1968. In the first room, designed as a behind-the-scenes operations centre, we experience a split-screen live view of the exhibition we are about to enter. Inside, a network of themed spaces and corridors bring to life the intricate world-building of Gucci for its ad campaigns. 

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Michele’s approach is undoubtedly theatrical—his campaigns unfold like scenes in a play and clothes become costumes. As you walk through the exhibition space, you can hold hands with mannequins inside an ’80s nightclub bathroom of the Berlin- set spring/summer 2016 campaign; pass through a mirrored labyrinth to enter a stately home like the one in the cruise 2016 campaign; and take a ride on an LA subway carriage that recreates Michele’s fall/winter 2015 campaign, his first after his appointment as creative director. 

The room that captured my imagination was the Obsession room. Pieces from the fall/winter 2018
collection fill the mirrored room from floor to ceiling, with rows upon rows of shelves stacked with hundreds of cuckoo clocks, ceramics and Marmont handbags. It’s also the room which reflects Michele’s compulsive collecting habit. “I have a special relationship with objects, and my work also means having a relationship with the physical objects surrounding us,” he said. 

The one thing that struck me the most was the candy floss pink that permeated every aspect of the exhibition, from the posters to the shopping bags to the carpet and the walls. Pink is a dystopian colour, a forbidden colour, and one that’s often associated with bad taste, according to Michele. Recurring throughout his tenure, he has used it to challenge convention and go against the flow.
“If you wear pink, you are different, and you have a different way of thinking,” he opined. 

This retrospective of Michele’s seminal campaigns caps a year of events celebrating Gucci’s centenary. Asked if Gucci saw “its future in its past”, he noted the past and present are incontrovertibly linked. “Everything is the past and everything is the present. There’s no present without the past. So if it’s true that fashion is now, fashion is also what has already been.” 

Related article: Step Into Gucci’s Creative Director Alessandro Michele’s World Of Wonder

Alas, Gucci did not see Michele in its future because less than 10 days after this interview, he left the House. In his Instagram post, he observed, “There are times when paths part ways because of the different perspectives each one of us may have.” His final words reiterated the need to be authentic, which shaped his vision for the House and rings true for the future of fashion: “May you always live by your passions, propelled by the wind of freedom.” It is a fitting coda for a designer who has nurtured so many blooms of fantasies, bulbs of ideas, and trees of wisdom in his garden of heavenly delights. 

The Gucci Garden Archetypes exhibition will be at the Powerhouse Ultimo in Sydney until 15 January 2023. 

Photographed by Christopher Quyen
Styled by Freddie Fredericks
Modelled by Lawrence Wong
Makeup by Carly Lim
Hair by Jesse Wakenshaw
First assistant director: Nele Becker
First assistant cameraman: Aaron VIII
Gaffer: Myles Kalus
Photography assistant and digital operator: Anne Thu Pham
Focus puller: Joel Lumbroso
Styling assistant: Jaimie Butel