Kubrick x Michele: Gucci Reinhabits The Films Of One Of Cinema’s Most Notable Maestros

Yes, it’s that Kubrick. Alessandro Michele (re) semanticizes film in his latest “Exquisite” campaign

Probed by the human adventure and its drift, Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele presents the “Exquisite” campaign as a tribute to cinema and to one of its brightest maestros, Stanley Kubrick. Exuding to his visionary power to dig up the real and morph it into something so vertiginously imaginative and questionable, Michele holds close to the insightful meaning behind a garment. Rather promoting it as a means to who we decide to be in the world and how it helps shape our desires and our ultimate sense of staying. That being said, in typical Michele fashion, Gucci’s latest collection conveys cinematography of the present: a score of eclectic and dissonant stories that can sacralize the human and its metamorphic ability.

For Michele, Stanley Kubrick is the ultimate manifestation of a philosophic filmmaker who, better than others, emanates the magic of that inextricable knot through which cinema exudes life and magnifies it. Always charmed by Kubrick’s experimental drive that goes beyond any possible categorization, to him, every film, in fact, digests the manifold souls where dystopia meets parody, the drama becomes human comedy, horror looks like a psycho-philosophic treatise, the feeling of truth evolves into the uncanny. That perhaps not just to Michele but to many, Kubrick was, in essence, a real sculptor of genres: the “cross-genre” director ahead of his time.

So with a nod to Kubrick, Michele reinhabits his films, disassembling, grafting, and reassembling them, pushing to the core of his incendiary approach. Sticking to his creative praxis, Michele seized those movies, re-semanticizing them, populating them with Gucci clothing, in an attempt to create short circuits where the Adidas gown, which had already lost its status of sportswear becomes a Victorian costume, appearing as a new character in the script of Barry Lyndon.

The dress designed by Laura Whitcomb, wearing which Madonna grabbed the New York spotlight in the nineties, fits in the gothic scenes of The Shining. The mysterious darkness of the enigmatic ritual of Eyes Wide Shut embraces a venus in fur, embellished with sensual bourgeois pearls. And more, the 90s shoes with a fetish flavor explode through the frames of A Clockwork Orange. Finally, the dreamiest evening dress dangled in soft tulle ruches bursts into the aseptic and dystopian space of the Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This situationist game mixes historical plans, references, and experiences. The past explodes into the present. Everything can become anything or something else. As in that famous scene of Kubrick’s masterpiece, where the bone turns into a spaceship. As in life.

Alessandro shared, “This involvement generates a change of state that is very significant for my job: clothes get closer to bare life again. They turn into highly imaginative functional prostheses, and they do so to tell a story. A story that shatters enchants, tortures, ignites. Because it’s the story of the human that dwells in each and every one of us. As Stanley Kubrick knew too well. And also Milena Canonero, a very dear friend of mine, who accepted my invitation to go back over some of the scenes that hailed her as undisputed star in the history of costume design. Her presence in this project is moving for me, a very precious gift.”

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