The latest twist in Alessandro Michele’s conceptual adventures through time and space at Gucci landed at Milan Fashion Week today. Its title is Gucci Vault and the elevator pitch is this: it’s a digital concept store whose offer includes choice vintage pieces from across the 100-year history of the house that are freshly refurbished by Gucci artisans and both customized and curated by Michele himself. That’s alongside exclusive new pieces from a 13-strong global roster of exciting emerging designers. This lucky list is made up of Ahluwalia, Bianca Saunders, Boramy Viguier, Charles de Vilmorin, Collina Strada, Cormio, Gui Rosa, Jordanluca, Rave Review, Rui Zhou, Shanel Campbell, Stefan Cooke, and Yueqi Qi.
The logic behind Michele’s latest venture seems powerful. The idea of a luxury house offering vintage pre-owned items from its history is creatively mature, sustainably sensitive, and has commercial potential. Gucci is not only making moves to own its resale market, but by customizing the items before reselling them it’s creating a new category of objects that are simultaneously vintage and new. And while other big luxury labels have offered retail support to younger designers in the past—as this Vogue Business take on the Gucci Vault outlined this morning—today’s cross-contamination of non-Gucci new-designer sizzle with vintage Gucci goodness can only benefit both sides.
This afternoon Michele hosted a press conference in the shadow of one of Milan’s most impressive monuments from the past: the triumphal arch built by Napoleon to mark the start of the French Emperor’s connecting road to his seat of power in Paris. Speaking at length, the designer disclosed that more young designers and brands will join the mix as the project develops. He also dropped several glowing references to Tom Ford’s tenure at the house, when Michele said Ford first kickstarted Gucci’s own internal archiving process. With Gucci’s 100th-anniversary show due in Ford’s hometown of Los Angeles in November, you wouldn’t bet against Michele/Ford overlap to come. For now, though, here is some of what Michele shared with us today.
Alessandro Michele: “This has not been designed to be profitable. The idea is to expand our love and create something different that is related to my passion for vintage, which is also a feature in my professional evolution. I am interested in mixing old things together with contemporary things. In the real estate market, people understand that some [old] places are magical. But in fashion, it is a different story. Old things are interesting only to experts or people like me who keep relics in their wardrobe, and who collect… you know, people tell me I need to declutter! My mother says, ‘You have to clean all this up!’
Anyway, this idea has never been mainstream in fashion—it was something for obsessional people. But now I think we should bring this to the center stage. So I thought about creating a place that could look like a vintage store with pieces that are a bridge to somewhere else. I customize them as if I have seen them for the first time: I put the mark on them somehow, with geometric shapes or with graphic signs… This is a multi-brand concept store. In real life, stores like these are difficult to find. And the ones we used to visit are no longer there—like Colette—and there are no new ones. But they are shrines of research, rather than shopping…
We selected some brands. I was really ignorant, although I knew some of them. I discovered some designers I was not familiar with and also the company did, too. If you read only one book or if you read hundreds of books, it is a different thing. There will be other brands in the future if they are happy to sell their pieces on Vault.
We called it Vault because a vault is a storage place for beautiful things that apparently have nothing to do with us, but actually this is not true because these pieces are a true source of life. I was asking all the time, ‘When are we going online?’ Because then there were a few pieces I really wanted to buy myself, but I decided to make them available on the website…
Many believe that time can be put aside, although this is not always the case—we are influenced and conditioned by time. It is the only passageway, somehow, that we have. The past is very present in fashion. It is difficult to defeat the past even when you are very talented: you coexist with the past and you should not feel guilty for that! To deny time is like denying the fact that roses bloom in spring.”