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It’s been a wild week at the House of Valentino, where beloved ex-Gucci designer Alessandro Michele will start as creative director on Tuesday, reports WWD. He replaces the likewise beloved Pierpaolo Piccioli, whose abrupt exit was announced on Friday. (Back Row readers have been weighing in on where he should work next; add your take!) So unlike the house of Givenchy, Valentino being designer-less ended up being a brief Vegas marriage instead of a prolonged state.
The consensus in the industry seems to be that it’s nice to have Michele back. First, it’s a relief when designers get these jobs instead of celebrities or influencers (though Michele, with his 1.2M Instagram followers, is also an influencer). Second, he ought to bring a jolt of personality to an industry that has been promoting experienced number-twos to creative director roles.
Seàn McGirr leads McQueen after running ready-to-wear for JW Anderson; Chemena Kamali leads Chloé after heading women’s ready-to-wear for Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent; and Sabato de Sarno leads Gucci after overseeing ready-to-wear for Piccioli at Valentino. This is probably what fashion needed after post-2010s, with toxic workplaces becoming unacceptable instead of just the way this industry is (“a million girls would kill for that job” etc.). Fashion needed to prove that it can be corporate and professional instead of revolving around cult of personality types whose creative brilliance excuses them for, say, talking to employees like they’re strangers in a comment section. (If not worse.)
Michele is the unique designer who became a cultural influencer and celebrity in his own right without being willfully acerbic or flirting with the bounds of cancel culture the way Karl Lagerfeld (an old boss of his) so casually and frequently did. Yet, he still did things that are hard to imagine company men doing: he sent Jared Leto down the Met Gala red carpet carrying a replica of his own head; he posed for Vogue wearing shorts, knee-high pink socks and cowboy boots; and he gave us quotes. The way Tom Ford (another former boss) so reliably gave us quotes.
"I really don't consider Kim Kardashian sexy," he says... "She's like one of those primordial sculptures of fertility, like the Venus of Willendorf." Referring not to Kardashian but to women in general, he adds, "Some women are forced by men to look a certain way, to be accepted by the general public, and I find that terrible."
Harper’s Bazaar, 2017, opining on the dated fashion calendar after showing men’s and women’s together in one show:
“I mean, fashion now is like an old lady that is dying on a bed,” Michele says of these changes, which he sees as vital for the industry. “I think we can let this old lady die. Fashion has done a lot of wrong things. I started when I was very young, in the ’90s, and it was one of the very attractive moments, but I think they tried to stay in this bubble—that fashion was just fashion, we are fashion, and this is not fashion, and we have to do the catwalk, and we have to do a season of things and products. I don’t think it’s working anymore.”
“I grew up with a father who didn’t wear a watch and this has permanently marked my relationship with time,” he concludes. “All that inspires me and all that I quote, whether it is one day or four hundred years old, occurs at the same time before my eyes, so it becomes the present. It’s my present, my time and it’s the only thing that I can and want to describe.”
The New York Times, 2018:
The “fashion industry” isn’t something Michele cares to dwell on or in. Among the reasons he favors [being based in] Rome, he says, is that he’s unlikely to bump into the designers, journalists, publicists and celebrities who define that demimonde. His thoughts aren’t contaminated by what is deemed trendy. “I want the separation,” he says. “I need the separation. I’m not really inspired from fashion. I started from other points of view.”
Vogue, 2019, on his obsessive tendencies as a designer:
“…In the beginning I was checking everything, but we are a huge company, and after two years I was dying and thinking I wanted to stop this job. It’s a beautiful job, but it’s dangerous because it’s something that can take everything from you. You can’t be just an image—you really need to be here to fight every day. I was reflecting that if your job becomes your prosthetic to make your life better, when you take it off, you will die. I don’t want that prosthetic. I want my life.”
It’s easy to forget that Michele himself was a number two — to Frida Giannini at Gucci — before taking the top spot. He wasn’t perfect as a creative director, but he was progressive in a way that inspired legions of young people. He got that culture was moving toward inclusivity and diversity and made that part of the Gucci brand. When he sent a jacket down the runway in 2017 that resembled a design by Daniel Day, aka Dapper Dan, Michele owned up to the screw-up and Gucci’s (and fashion’s) lack of diversity. Gucci then hired Day to collaborate and launched diversity initiatives.
Fashion conglomerates seem more desperate for handbag sales than they have in a long time, and it sounds like Valentino is also desperate for handbag sales too, but Michele’s insouciance ought to inject some levity into things.
Loose Threads
Kim Kardashian is being sued by Donald Judd’s foundation for allegedly calling knockoff Donald Judd tables and chairs in her office the real thing in a YouTube video. The Whitney Museum, everyone:
Jenna Lyons has confirmed her appearance on the Real Housewives of New York’s next season — along with Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Lichy, Jessel Taank, and Brynn Whitfield. Who’s watching??
A screening of a film on Tom Wolfe in Palm Beach had a white dress code and you know who showed up in black? Tom Ford, that minx.
Versace held a sample sale in New York and more than a thousand shoppers rushed the store, causing NYPD to shut it down. “People ran to the front and then they stayed at the front, and then the people in the second batch argued about it and then total chaos ensued,” a man who attended said in a TikTok. “So now there’s a whole gabble in the front, people are not moving their cars, people are fighting the staff, people are fighting each other.”
Karlie Kloss has a new company called Bedford Media, which recently announced it would relaunch Life magazine, with her husband Joshua Kushner acting as publisher. Honestly, I don’t get it, but if they want to commission journalism, great.
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Bedford Media makes me think of The Hundred from Succession.
Those quotes from Michele make me laugh. What a bunch of nonsensical bumph! I mean: “All that inspires me and all that I quote, whether it is one day or four hundred years old, occurs at the same time before my eyes, so it becomes the present. It’s my present, my time and it’s the only thing that I can and want to describe.” WTF?! Word salad gone wild.