People who are just starting to dig into fashion history often ask me for reading recommendations, and my answer has been the same since I started this journey myself a decade ago: Anne Hollander’s slim volume Sex and Suits. Hollander, along with Elizabeth Wilson (whose Adorned in Dreams I’ll also heartily plug), was one of the first academics to make the case for fashion as a subject worthy of intellectual interrogation. In Suits, she posits that the suit is the most evolved expression of modernity in fashion history, since it is universally flattering and easy to move in, while womenswear constantly changes to reinterpret old-fashioned ideas and fantasies about femininity and womanhood.
I thought about Sex and Suits as soon as I saw the first look in Gucci’s fall 2022 show in Milan on Friday: a navy double-breasted suit with loose but not billowing trousers on a model with seafoam-green hair, giant gold earrings, and a pair of black pointy pumps that looked like the best $250 you ever spent at a secondhand shop. The model’s hands were slung in their trouser pockets, and their chin was tipped upward; eyes half-closed behind sunglasses, suggesting a kind of checked-out bliss. Although they were dressed in a totally classic suit (and the preferred jacket style of cartoon millionaires everywhere), they looked more contemporary, more at ease, than many models I’ve seen on the runway lately, where fantasy has dominated. It was an expression of Hollander’s thesis that the suit isn’t just the perfect garment, but Western culture’s premiere fashion achievement.
In a press conference after the show, Michele perched in a green velvet chair and extemporized on just about everything. “I’m not a nostalgic person, because I really like life,” he opined at one point. “I like, for instance, breakfast—the ritual of breakfast, waking up.” The creative director also discussed this new focus on suiting. He said the women on his team often express admiration for menswear and love wearing men’s suits. “The line is so straight and neat on a men’s suit,” he said. That opening suit is technically a men’s suit, “with the neatness, the rigor of menswear,” Michele said, but was shown on a woman, and will presumably be styled and merchandised as such.
The silhouette appeared again and again throughout the show with great little tweaks on men and women with all different looks—in mousy, academic corduroy on a dude with Harry Styles’s Adonis hair; in a subtle Gucci monogram print in Wall Street gray on a woman in a beanie; and, my personal favorite, in olive glen plaid with a fur lapel, worn by a mod smirking under a knit beret. “You don’t need much to adapt them to masculine or feminine bodies,” Michele said of the suit, which is what makes good tailoring successful. You put it on, look professional and comfortable, and go.
This is a quiet though frankly electrifying concept for a designer known for his madcap eclecticism. Michele smashed onto the scene in 2015, and the magpie look of his first few years, in which models wore sequined gowns under track jackets with crazy platforms and granny glasses, still looks to me much like the way people under 35 dress in cities like New York, L.A., Paris, and Milan, and on Instagram and TikTok, too. That look was like a social media feed of personal passions and funny thrift shop or Depop finds. That’s to say that the look still seems relevant, as the models in this show’s plaid capes, jacquard fur-trim jackets, and leather miniskirts with big old faux-fur zebra coats demonstrated.
But that was seven years ago, and fashion crowds expect something new. Nonetheless, I’m fascinated by Michele’s pivot to suiting, which began around the time of his anniversary show in April of last year, when he launched the “hacking” project with Balenciaga, which saw both designers borrow the signatures of the other and plaster them with the other’s logo. It was for this show that Michele remade his predecessor Tom Ford’s famous red velvet suit. This new collection foregrounded the suit even more: a roomy fire-engine red style with baggy straight-leg trousers and rhinestone jumbo lapels; a piano key ivory-colored suit with velvet black lapels and stovepipe leg; boxy collarless blazers in classic tweeds and windowpanes that would work perfectly with track pants. Now, it seems, Michele is making the case for the suit as the contemporary avatar of gender-fluid fashion, which is a novel idea when fluidity for the past few years has primarily been articulated by male-identifying celebrities adapting more feminine shapes, colors, and styles.
Michele kick-started the current gender-fluid movement in high fashion—look back at that first collection, fall 2015 men’s, and you’ll be wowed by the “pinched from Grandma” quality in the fit and fabrics of the little coats and blouses he dressed his men in. In his press conference, Michele acknowledged that “gender fluidity has become a marketing catchphrase. Very often these words are abused.” As a kid, he said, “I didn’t really need a definition, and now I prefer having the personality of people included in my marketing [and] ads.” Snoop Dogg, Beanie Feldstein, and model Liu Wen are some of the faces of Gucci’s latest campaign, for example—in other words, nobody with a particular agenda to their style, just figures with charisma—who represent Michele’s individual approach to dressing.
The other big news on the Gucci runway—well, aside from the fact that Rihanna and Rocky showed up and sat front row—was a collaboration with Adidas. The sportswear giant is like the fashion world’s most polyamorous lover, making sneakers, bags, and track suits with Prada, and shoes and beautiful (honestly, angelic!) sportswear with Grace Wales Bonner. Do we need another street-luxury remix? I don’t think so. And after Michele and Balenciaga’s Demna turned the event of two brands coming together inside out with their outrageous “hacking” project last year, it’s a bit underwhelming. Of course, if Rihanna runs an errand in that sharp-shouldered red T-shirt gown, I’ll probably have to change my tune.
Rachel Tashjian is the Fashion News Director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Previously, she was GQ’s first fashion critic, and worked as deputy editor of GARAGE and as a writer at Vanity Fair. She has written for publications including Bookforum and Artforum, and is the creator of the invitation-only newsletter Opulent Tips.
