Gucci Presents Exquisite
Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele, shares his personal views on Exquisite – Gucci's latest campaign celebrating one of cinema's brightest maestros, Stanley Kubrick.

I’ve always been charmed by cinema. For its power to tell stories that can probe human adventure and its drift. For its visionary power to dig up in the real, making it vertiginously imaginative and questionable. Such a careful look on the human, after all, is so close to me. I could never imagine clothes as severed from the story and life of the person wearing them. If you ask me, a garment is not, and never will be, just a piece of fabric. It’s rather the means through which we are able to unfold who we really decide to be, it’s how we shape our desires and the ultimate sense of our staying. That’s why I’ve always imagined my collections as films able to convey a cinematography of the present: a score of stories, eclectic and dissonant, that can sacralize the human and its metamorphic ability.
The “Exquisite” campaign is my tribute to cinema and to one of its brightest maestros, Stanley Kubrick. A philosophic filmmaker who, better than others, emanated the magic of that inextricable knot through which cinema exudes life and magnifies it. I’ve always admired Kubrick’s remarkable capacity in tackling very different subjects. His experimental drive goes beyond any possible categorization. Every film, in fact, digests the manifold souls where dystopia meets parody, drama becomes human comedy, horror looks like a psycho-philosophic treatise, the feeling of truth evolves into the uncanny. Kubrick was, in essence, a real sculptor of genres: the “cross-genre” director, ahead of his time. His ability to build stories that exceed significance, crossing borders and setting labels on fire, has always been deeply inspiring to me.
Credits
Creative Director: Alessandro Michele
Art Director: Christopher Simmonds
Photographers & Directors: Mert & Marcus
Make up: Thomas De Kluyver
Hair: Paul Hanlon