Perception Is Reality

At the heart of the Gucci Exquisite collection lurks the axiom that nothing is truly what they seem. Creative director Alessandro Michele uses mirrors as metaphors to encourage us to witness hidden worlds hidden amongst our reflections.

- Manfred Lu

What is in a mirror? Rarely, if ever, do we ask that question. An object meant to be pure is, ironically, home to demons. How we observe ourselves can be a mirror of the nightmares we are haunted by. Some of the most vigorous philosophers use it as a jumping point to interrogate our desires, dreams and, frighteningly, the very nature of our reality. Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho once insisted that “the visible is always a mirror of the invisible. Reality is imagined before it manifests itself.” Suppose Coelho’s philosophy is an elegy for the reality that hides right beneath our line of vision. In that case, Alessandro Michele’s work at Gucci provides us with a helping hand to see that hidden world hidden amongst our reflections.

Mirror philosophies were heavily on Michele’s mind throughout the Gucci Exquisite show: an 84-look compendium dedicated to the abstraction that, like mirrors, it possesses the ability to shift our realities. And while terror immediately spews from most dissections on mirrors, the creative director chose instead to focus on the beauty of it, a perspective Michele interprets as a “myth of the exact vision that inevitably ends up in freezing the immaginific power of the world.” Here, mirrors offer Michele a chance to expand beyond fashion’s limitations — the discourse of form and function — and reveal a compelling thesis on “metamorphosing” ideas.