Gucci Garden Archetypes opens at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum takes visitors inside the mind of Gucci’s former creative director Alessandro Michele.
The journey into Alessandro Michele’s extraordinary mind begins on the subway in LA in 2015. For his first campaign as creative director at Italian luxury fashion house Gucci, the designer explored the concept of modernity by setting it on public transport. In one shot, there was a single model, standing statute-like, immaculate, except for her hair blowing across her face as the train pulls up.
“She is a vision of this disconnected modernity, standing still but also looking to the future; the shine of the dress catches the same reflections of the passing train, as she gazes towards the destination,” reads the description of this fashion moment. “Neither fully of the past nor the future, the Gucci Fall-Winter 2015 campaign set about defining a new mode of what it means to be contemporary.”
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We are not in LA on a subway nor in the archives of Gucci’s headquarters in Florence, but in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. This campaign image – represented by a fully clothed mannequin in a recreated subway train – is part of a new exhibition honouring Michele’s most seminal campaigns since he took the helm of the brand and turned it into luxury and cultural juggernaut. His seven-year tenure recently ended.
“I thought it was interesting to accompany people in these almost eight years of adventure, inviting them to cross the imaginary, the narrative, the unexpected, the glitter,” Michele says. “So I created a playground of emotions that are the same as the campaigns, because they are the most explicit journey into my imagery.”
The exhibition – called Gucci Garden Archetypes – opened in November with a live interview with Michele himself beamed in from Italy. It is free for the public, runs until January 15 next year, and comprises multiple rooms and experiences that originally debuted in Florence. It is on a global tour, with Sydney its seventh stop following Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul.
There is a wall of 182 cuckoo clocks and toweringly high glass cabinets stacked with hundreds of ceramic plates, cups and figurines, 160 Gucci marmont handbags and 1800 teddy bears in another part of the exhibition. It pays homage to Michele’s Fall-Winter 2018 campaign, called Collectors. These images were all about passionate and obsessive hobbyists, set in a historical ski resort in the Austrian mountains and included are interviews with the collectors of the items themselves.
Visitors can also get a glimpse into a 1980s nightclub bathroom in Berlin for the Spring Summer 2016 campaign, in which Michele imagined “young rebellious romantics” running wild through the German city, inspired by the brutalist architecture, distinctive yellow trains, vibrant culture and hedonistic nightlife. It was seen as an unofficial sequel to Michele’s 2015 fashion imagery on the LA subway.
There is also a room of flowers representing the house’s fragrance, Gucci Bloom, graffitied walls from Paris as part of Michele’s tribute to Parisian youth in his pre-fall 2018 season, and even a mirrored digital labyrinth that represents the stately home at the heart of the Cruise 2016 campaign.
Powerhouse Museum chief executive Lisa Havilah says they were thrilled to mount the immersive journey through the inspirations and campaigns of such a prominent fashion designer. The exhibition is supported by the NSW government’s $40 million blockbuster exhibition initiative and Arts Minister Ben Franklin says that this free, world-class exhibition is a major cultural attraction.
“Alessandro Michele is a world-leading creative talent and Gucci Garden Archetypes will offer locals and visitors the opportunity to immerse themselves in his creative world,” he says.