Alessandro Michele Revealed His Latest Collection For Gucci: Twinsburg

With a fascination for asymmetrical reciprocity, Alessandro Michele revealed his latest collection for the House across two runways, each a reflection of the other.

"I am ason of twomothers: mum Eralda and mum Giuliana. Two extraordinary women who made their twinship the ultimateseal of their existence. They lived in thesame body. They dressed and combed their hair in thesame way. They were magically mirrored. One multiplied the other. That was my world, perfectly double and doubled.

I remember them,smiling,sitting at a cafe. Together, they were home. Theyshared a geneticsolidarity but, above all, theyshared asecret intimacy which was inaccessible to others: an ancestral alliance, oblivious of itself,since it was born in a time that came long before them.

Atschool, my teacher looked quite worried when I said I had twomothers. To me, instead, that was absolutely normal. That was the weird family I had always had, I didn't know anything different after all. Actually, it wasn't even important to know which of them gave birth to me. They both were generative deities in my Olympus.

The grace of their duplicated and expanded love gave rise to my eternal fascination for the double, for the things thatseem to reflect equal to themselves. Everysingle time, I catch an aura of beauty insuchspecular multiplication. It's so familiar, and powerful. A trembling miracle challenging the impossible.

It's exactly the impossibility of the perfectly identical that nourishes the magic of twins. A genomicspell wanted to makesuch creatures precisely thesame but, as a matter of fact, they live on impalpable discrepancies and misalignments. It's the deception ofsimilitude. Thegame of illusion of a crackedsymmetry.

Twinsburg plays this game, producing a tension in the relationship between original and copy. As if by magic, clothes duplicate. Theyseem to lose theirstatus ofsingularity. The effect is alienating
and ambiguous. Almost a rift in the idea of identity, and then, the revelation: thesame clothes emanate different qualities onseemingly identical bodies. Fashion, after all, lives onserial multiplications that don't hamper the most genuine expression of every possible individuality.

Thetwin nature lives on this perturbing oxymoron and urges us to think that what wesee is notalways what we get. Facing a double, we are forced to be more careful in catching and naming the differences, even the slightest. My mums,seemingly identical, were actuallyreflected and complementary extensions. One integrating the design of the other. They didn't coincide.

Such asymmetrical reciprocity founds the deepestsense of twinship. It's thespecular relationship between identity and otherness: the copresence of differentsubjects in connection. All the twins,
in fact,since birth, are well aware of not being at the center of the universe. They are used to living with anotherself. The boundaries of their body don't correspond to the boundaries of their being.

In thissense, twinship imposes an experience of decentralization. Leaning towards the other. Recognizing oneself as flesh of the world. It's a topos that transcends biology,showing us the sense of co-belonging andsisterhood thatshould guide our trip through this planet. It's the possibility to feel part of that connective tissue that defines our common creatural destiny."

To my twin mums, that were able to comprehend life only through the presence of  the other.

Alessandro

Credits:

Music direction by Alessandro Michele and Giovanni Attili
Music Composed by Gustave Rudman
Performed by Budapest Scoring Orchestra
Voiceover by Marianne Faithful
Lyrics: "Identical Twins" by John Forster Published by Limousine Music Co. (ASCAP)