It was breakfast time on the East Coast one morning in April, and Gucci designer Alessandro Michele was speaking to journalists via Zoom after debuting his new collection in a splashy film, “Gucci Aria,” on the Italian company’s website. The short movie, set in a make-believe nightclub, was a ready-to-wear mash-up of the brand’s history and its contemporary provocations, all set to a soundtrack that celebrated its influential position in popular culture. The songs “Gucci Gang,” “Green Gucci Suit” and “Gucci Flip Flops” serenaded the models as they walked.
Michele is both a contrarian and a prognosticator. Much of what he does goes against the grain and then becomes the standard. He didn’t characterize this collection, which marked the brand’s 100th anniversary, as one for fall or spring. He was simply showing 94 new ensembles on 94 models. And after the film ended, he settled into a chair in front of a carved mantelpiece set with blue porcelain to explain his eccentric thinking about clothes and casting.
For years, Michele has looked to the farthest extremes of human appearance for his models. “I analyzed all the strange faces, the freaks I placed on the catwalk, on the set,” Michele told us through an interpreter. “The strangeness sends a signal. It makes you turn somehow. And I really went in-depth there. I [dissected] all the forms of strange beauty.” In its marketing, Gucci embraced ugly ducklings, the jolie laide and the faces only a mother could love — decisions that influenced other brands to follow this path and to break down barriers.
But for this presentation, Michele had made an even more daring, evolved choice. “I tried to find what would define ordinary beauty,” he said. “The faces that you see in the film, the beautiful faces of many people you come across in the street, that beauty has its own life.” With so many miles and layers of technology separating us, something, anything, that felt real also felt profoundly valuable; the ordinary, in other words, is enough. Dressed in Gucci’s sparkles and marabou and velvet, regular people, too, have the capacity to deliver fashion that is transporting.
For generations, the modeling world was reserved for women and men with a certain élan and traditional Western appeal. Models were of a standard height: tall but not distractingly so. They were young and thin — and for much of the 20th century, they got progressively thinner until they were little more than stick figures with blood and sinew. They were born with long limbs, narrow hips, symmetrical facial features and a willingness to promenade in dizzyingly high heels. And mostly they were White.
But the ranks of models have been changing — slowly, incrementally — until, in a moment of relative quiet, with fashion’s carousel stilled by the pandemic, we can today look around and realize how different things are from a decade ago. Classic models are by far more racially diverse. Yet there are other, less sweeping changes that are no less significant. Models are also more varied by ethnicity, size, age and disability: Change is manifest in octogenarian author Joan Didion serving as the brand ambassador for Céline, model Halima Aden wearing a hijab and burkini in Sports Illustrated, writer Sinéad Burke making history as the first little person on the cover of British Vogue, and African American poet Amanda Gorman on the cover of the magazine’s American edition. In today’s fashion ecosystem, an amputee pinup pouts from the pages of a swimsuit calendar and a young woman with Down syndrome stars in a Gucci beauty campaign.
The deeper change, however, focuses on the nature of representation. Modeling hasn’t simply opened its doors to attractive members of groups that were once excluded or the so-called freaks that Michele adores. Increasingly, everyone is a model — or at least, everyone can be. We can be airbrushed influencers in our own Instagram stories, mini pitchmen on TikTok and street-cast character actors in advertisements for mass-market brands like Dove and Third Love or high-end labels such as Rick Owens and Balenciaga. Model agencies these days pride themselves on signing virtually anyone who simply wants to be a model rather than only those approved by conventional wisdom. Fashion models are no longer an embodiment of exclusivity. They are, instead, a reflection of the mundane and the gloriously imperfect.
The impetus for the fashion industry to rethink its exclusive ways is coming from outside and inside, from frustrated agitators wanting to upend the system and stakeholders who want to reinvigorate it. It’s coming after a year of racial unrest, a year in which so many of us have been forced to sit with our presumptions and stereotypes — and reconsider them. All of us should be counted among the beautiful ones, these change agents argue. All of us are worthy. Subscribe TS Studios on Youtube
