Gucci reigns supreme: The rise and rise of visionary designer Alessandro Michele

last updated 22 September 2016

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The visionary is the only true realist, said Italy's master filmmaker Federico Fellini, who always believed art should dare to be different in its pursuit of beauty and honesty.

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He now has more than a stage - he has an empire. And what a beguiling iconoclast he makes, with his long, curly mane, full beard and uniform of jeans and plain white T-shirt. He wears more rings than a Hell's Angel - "Rings make me feel like a shaman," he says. "It's like the Pope; he's covered with rings and the people know his power" - but looks more like Jesus mixed with a dash of Frank Zappa, which chimes nicely with the rock-star-come-messiah image the fashion world has bestowed upon him for turning Gucci into the hottest label on the planet.

Away from the exuberance of his catwalks, the romantic and the sacred are part of Michele's vision every day. Gucci's design studios are set within the Renaissance splendour of the Palazzo Alberini, just a stone's throw from the Tiber and overlooking the Castel Sant'Angelo, which was formerly one of the Eternal City's most significant papal residences. Furthermore, Michele's weekend home – he lives with partner Giovanni Attili, a professor in urban planning – is a former convent in the medieval hilltop town of Civita di Bagnoregio. In Rome, the couple share a top-floor apartment in the historic centre, above Trattoria Polese, the preferred restaurant of cardinals and Vatican notables. "I envy them sometimes when I look down and see them enjoying their desserts so much," he says, laughing.

Michele and Attili own two Boston terriers and a Falabella miniature horse, although it's a surprise there's room for pets, given how crammed their homes are with colourful and ornate antiques – including armfuls of rings, necklaces and bracelets – from their many travels abroad. You only have to view Michele's Instagram account to see how much life imitates art in the domestic setting. Indeed, many of his looks are inspired by his collection of vintage fabrics and carpets, picked up at London's Portobello Road and the Clignancourt market in Paris.

Michele was relatively unknown outside the industry two years ago. He had worked at Gucci for 12 years prior to his accession, holding various prestigious positions, and was handpicked by Tom Ford in 2002 to work in London, becoming head of accessories soon after. The designer was working as an associate to creative director Frida Giannini when new chief executive, Marco Bizzarri, orchestrated a shock company reshuffle and awarded him Giannini's role. In terms of rank, therefore, he was more the anonymous all-rounder than the proverbial pontiff he has since become.

The story behind Giannini's exit from Gucci is no secret - she was ousted from her position, along with her husband, Patrizio di Marco, the label's former chief executive, when sales ebbed over an 18-month period. In the tough economic climate, consumers had simply tired of Giannini's sleek, controlled style that played heavily on Gucci's equestrian history. To the outside world, the couple's exit was a bombshell, but at Gucci HQ, there were plans to turn round the fashion house's fortunes – and fast.

Michele's impact was immediate, or rather he ensured it by meeting the challenge of producing his first menswear collection in less than a week – five days, to be precise. The AW15 collection was a triumph. Billed as "Urban Romanticism", the show harked back to the dreamy ambiguity of Mick Jagger's iconic white dress at the Rolling Stones' 1969 concert  in Hyde Park, with models in sheer pussybow-tie blouses and whimsical lace tops. The flounce was offset by Michele's modern vision of young Left Bank intellectuals: dandies clad in colourful berets, nerdy glasses, rib-hugging sweaters and hefty 1970s-style duffle coats. The stand-out accessories were his now-signature Gucci loafers trimmed with fur, which remain a commercial hit. A handful of female models played gender swapsies in boyish suits, loose-fitting grandpa trousers and long-line military jackets.

Bohemian gender-blurring was on everyone's lips, except those of the designer, who claims he's indifferent to the idea of androgyny. "A lot of people are talking about cross-gender," he says. "I don't care about this idea. I think that if you talk about beauty, sexuality is less important. I start with beauty and romance, and when you try to work with the beauty, with the soul, with that kind of aesthetic, in the end sexuality disappears."

Born to arty parents in Rome in 1972, Michele is a flower child of the 1970s himself. His mother and father have passed away, but there's no doubt their bohemian spirit continues to influence his work - he carries miniature pictures of them inside one of the many lockets that dangle from a gold antique bracelet on his wrist. His mother, who shared Michele's passion for movies and stage sets, had a job in the film industry as an executive assistant. His father worked for airline Alitalia, although Michele describes him as "a shaman",  a spiritual soul happiest when surrounded by nature or creating sculptures.

Michele began his career as senior accessories designer at Fendi. "After college, I realised I had talent, thanks to my hands," he recounts. "When I have a pencil in my hand, I can sketch really quickly. So eventually I had an interview in Roma with Silvia Venturini Fendi [scion of the Fendi family and head of accessories and menswear]. It was at the time of the first Baguette bag [launched in 1997]. I was so fascinated with the idea of working with Karl Lagerfeld [creative director of womenswear at Fendi]. It was the most exciting moment of my life, because I have to say that this family, at that time, was really a crazy place."

The desinger may look and sound like a bit of a hippy, but he's no dilettante when it comes to knowing what sells. Accessories are the cash cow of any luxury brand, so forging his career at the business heart of both Fendi and Gucci has no doubt enabled him to push his quirky aesthetic forward with the confidence of a seasoned brand strategist. Indeed, one of his first moves was to reconfigure Gucci's famous double-G – "its coat of arms" – and make it emblematic once again. A rounder, softer motif was created and placed on belt buckles, bags, even clothes.

For his AW 2016 womenswear collection, Michele enlisted the help of Brooklyn-based graffiti artist GucciGhost (real name Trevor Andrew) to tag accessories and collection pieces with spray-painted Gucci logos as a jovial spin on the art of appropriation. Similarly, the designer kitted out models in bold Gucci-branded T-shirts for his Cruise 2017 menswear collection, recalling the counterfeits found at market stalls. For all his swirly romanticism and embroidered finery, Michele is also a master of surprise.

Like all designers, Gucci's new boy has his heroes, each very different to the other. He admires Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci for being "the first to really bring the street into an old couture brand". Britain's Jonathan Anderson is another favourite, as is Alexander McQueen, who he describes as "the biggest designer of the last 50 years" and regards as a visionary motivated by the need to produce beauty in all its forms.

The show – Michele's second womenswear collection – was also a timely reminder of the growing importance of Cruise collections in fashion. A collection that enters boutiques in November and remains until June. Clothes that address the global elite, our modern leisure-class, whose wardrobes are steered by high-brow seasonal markers like Christmases in Switzerland and exotic winter-sun holidays. A Chelsea art gallery was transformed into an Aladdin's cave of decorative opulence as models glided along dozens of Turkish rugs. Bedecked in jewels, their necks framed by bursts of fabric flowers, the cast took on the bravado of imperial princesses-turned-party girls, still geeky but swathed in magic. The aristocratic softness of sheer blouses, Renaissance-inspired patterns, tumbling chiffon and transparent lace was offset by the 1970s allure of shimmery lurex, fun fur and an embroidered menagerie of glittering insects, tropical birds, coiling snakes and Sumatran tigers.

While Cruise 2016 wowed the fashion world, it was nothing compared to the coup Michele engineered in London this June when he staged the first catwalk show ever in  the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. The sheer audacity certainly ruffled a few feathers, given the Abbey is the final resting place of many of the nation's most celebrated holy men, poets, prime ministers, soldiers and monarchs, but Gucci's Cruise 2017 collection also made history by celebrating British eccentricity through the eyes of an even more idiosyncratic Italian.

Symbolically, there's no getting around the fact that the show was an acknowledgment of the designer's supremacy, or, better still,  a metaphorical ringing of bells to herald fashion's new sovereign. Displaying the same left-field sense of fun as he had with GucciGhost and the logo tagging, Michele was paying worship to Britain's great stylistic tribes – albeit radically reimagined in a setting that has stood for all that is historical and proper for hundreds of years.

"When I came here at the end of the Eighties, I thought it was the place I wanted to live, " he said at the show's end. "So, with this collection, I put [in] a lot of things I loved about London. All your little tribes walking around the city; there are some things that belong to the past and others that are contemporary. That's very English to me. I always say that you can find a punk that has his cup of tea. Why not? It is possible. Isn't that beautiful?"

His procession had Elizabethan punk princesses; aristo girls in floaty dresses, fit for a debauched game of croquet on the lawn; "Bloomsbury Set" ladies in masculine suits and pretty frocks; medieval wenches in lashings of flock fabric, and, of course, more embroidery than you could shake a sceptre at – only this time with the inclusion of appliqué cats and dogs, tigers and rarefied beasts. Michele's men were Punks, Teddy Boys and New Romantics, mashing up retro references with studs, bovver boots, tie-dye, tartan and even buckled winkle-pickers. The crowning glory, though, were the looks that pointed to the Queen herself, with models clutching handbags, hair hidden beneath silk scarves tightly knotted under chins. Here was Ma'am as envisaged by Michele. One look, though emblazoned with the face of a screaming polar bear, was even fashioned in her favourite baby blue.

Some critics have since accused Michele of repetition, but this seems a lazy way to lambast  a designer who spurns fashion's fickle obsession with seasonal reinvention and instead throws his whole self into a finely tuned aesthetic that reflects his personality and soul. As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" Or, to put it more eloquently, we can return full circle to Fellini, one of cinema's most noted commentators on the human condition. "I always direct the same film," the great director once said. "I can't distinguish one from another." Repetition never did him any harm.

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