The cyborg aesthetic of Alessandro Michele

Taking place in a medical operating room and directed by its former creative director Alessandro Michele, the Gucci Fall 2018 fashion show featured numerous pieces of clothing without any apparent coherence. Among the Italian fashion house’s historical references (Web stripes, monogram or Flora print), other elements drew on a wide range of sources of inspiration, from fashion history (Chanel tweed) to religious clothing (Catholic stole or Sikh turban), via collaboration with Major League Baseball or other movie motifs (Pussy Cat Kill Kill, Paramount logo).
Thus, the show could be understood by some through the prism of the multiculturalism characteristic of the 1980s, of which Jean-Paul Gaultier was one of the incarnations. However, the theoretical reference used by Alessandro Michele, the Cyborg Manifesto, published in 1985 by the American feminist Donna Haraway, offers us the possibility of another reading. The philosopher, often associated with the post-humanist movement, calls for the creation of a post-genre world built around the figure of the cyborg, against the myth of origin, and all binarity, whether human-animal, organic-machine, physical or immaterial. Reading this text gives us a more precise grasp of the meaning of the show. Michele’s challenge is to imagine a post-human creature, on the model of the Cyborg, through the use of various heterogeneous inspirations.
Drawing on a corpus of different Gucci fashion shows from Fall 2015 to Resort 2023, the article aims to reread
Michele’s work through the posthuman aesthetic defined by Anneke Smelik in 2022. It will argue that Alessandro
Michele’s work for Gucci must be understood according to his attempt to formulate a post-human aesthetic, tending to reveal the constructed nature of clothing identities.

IFFTI Annual Proceedings, Vol.3, April 2024, p. 381-387.