With deep sincerity, the Creative Director Alessandro Michele shares with the Gucci

Community the pages written in his home in Rome during the last few months.

ROME MARCH 29, 2020 -‐ WE HAVE DISCOVERED SMALL THINGS

In these days of confinement, in a suspended time that we struggle to imagine free, I try to ask myself about the meaning of my actions. It is a vital and urgent question for me, which forces me to listen subtly, to stop carefully. It is the attempt to name, with the precision of love, my fears and my desires. It is the opportunity to challenge the aphasia that every trauma imposes. After all, the tragedy we are experiencing is opening up new spaces for reflection. We could never have imagined that we could feel so tied to life by a bond of tremor and excruciating tenderness. We could never have thought of recontacting, in such a profound way, the fragility of our creatural destiny. Our need for reciprocity. We found out little thing. A miracle of nothing. Above all, we understood that we had gone oversized. Our unscrupulous actions set fire to the house we live in. We believed ourselves to be other than nature, more clever and omnipotent. We have tamed, dominated and injured her. We unleashed Prometheus, and buried Pan. How much arrogance has made us lose our sisterhood with butterflies, flowers, trees and roots. How much unscrupulous greed has made us lose understanding and care, connection and belonging. We earthquake the sacredness of life, forget about our being species. In the end, we lost our breath.

ROME APRIL 7, 2020 – ON WHAT WE WOULD NOT LIKE TO COME BACK EQUAL

Today that the devastation has found us unprepared, we must be able to reflect on what we would not like to return the same. Because the biggest risk, for our tomorrow, is to abdicate any real and necessary discontinuity. Unfortunately, our history is studded with crises that have taught us nothing. Of economic collapses and social devastations that have been faced by imposing the same recipes that had generated them. Of wounds that have not had the ability to regenerate thought. Of mourning that we have not been able to live to change ourselves and our relationships. This crisis therefore represents a fundamental test case. Try in the sense of pain, fatigue, danger. But also in the sense of evaluation and judgment. Because it is precisely in pain that we have the opportunity to look critically at our recent past. To the list of debts, misunderstandings, out of tune, errors. To missteps and unconsciousness. The deafening lack of thoughts that we didn’t have the courage to formulate. This present therefore gives each of us important responsibilities. Everyone can exercise them, with respect to their role and their actions, to contribute to a constellation of molecular and widespread changes. In my own small way, I urgently feel the need to change many things in my job. After all, the inclination to change has always characterized my professional life, marking it with a natural and joyful creative restlessness. But this crisis is as if it had amplified this transformative urgency, making it no longer deferrable.

ROME APRIL 27, 2020 – THE MOTIVE OF A CHOICE

The change that I imagine first of all passes through the ability to recontact the deeper reasons that pushed me to enter the world of fashion. I feel the need to renew a pact, purifying the essential from the superfluous. I feel the need to come back, in an authentic way, to the motive for a choice. For that set of reasons that built my going. Over time, I understood that these motifs have different names and intensities, but they all fatally gather around the same urgency: the possibility of telling. It is this possibility, so ancestral and powerful, that has always allowed me to build expressive passages, to give space to that inexpressible nucleus that agitates my dreams, to celebrate the nostalgia of imperfection, to pay homage to the beauty that blooms in form in shape. It is this possibility that allows me to grasp, with infinite bites, the daily love of existence.

GUCCI

Alessandro Michele