Why does Gucci keep booming under a designer obsessed with ambiguity, nostalgia and obscure trivia?

"What are we going to do with the future?" Alessandro Michele, who asks the question, has no intention of answering it — and that posture is considered "cool."

A purple curtain rose slowly, revealing a long, narrow corridor wrapped in acrylic glass. It circled a pyramid with a metallic sheen, topped by a weathervane in the shape of a rooster. The music started and the models began walking back and forth inside the glass corridor, in time with neon lights that shifted from pink to purple to green, as if they were moving through a time capsule.

This was Gucci's first combined menswear and womenswear show, and the first show staged at its new Milan headquarters, a 377,000-square-foot (roughly 35,000-square-meter) complex. In the final quarter of the 2016 fiscal year, shortly after creative director Alessandro Michele's third womenswear collection reached stores, revenue growth jumped from an already striking 17% to 21.4%. Gucci's full-year revenue grew 12.7%, making it the best-performing brand at Kering apart from Yves Saint Laurent.

When Alessandro Michele took over in January 2015, people were still a little skeptical of this Roman who had worked quietly in Gucci's accessories department for more than a decade, and of his romantic, bookish "geek chic." The current sales figures and the current critical mood have turned that skepticism into anticipation. Alexander Fury, a critic for The New York Times's T Magazine, called Michele and Demna Gvasalia, the mastermind behind Vetements, "fashion revolutionaries who have seized the spirit of the times" in an article last April. America's CFDA, Britain's GQ and the British Fashion Council each, in turn, named him Designer of the Year for 2016.

So it is not hard to understand why fashion media, critics and industry insiders were so excited before and after the show. They were busy decoding it: What new species of animal or flower had Michele added to the prints this time? Which philosopher did he quote in this season's show notes? What did his theme actually mean?

If those are the only questions you want to ask, Alessandro Michele can satisfy you completely. As always, he picked a theme that invites curiosity and interpretation and stretches easily across the decades: "the alchemist's garden."

The teaser images were a few vintage oil paintings that put bees, tulips and charging cables in the same frame. The invitation was made to look like a vinyl record: the 24-year-old artist Coco Capitan scrawled "What are we going to do with all this future?" across the cover, so that it looked like the Drake album that went viral on social media. Side A showed the ouroboros, the symbol of eternal life in ancient Egyptian alchemy, and carried Florence Welch — lead singer of Florence and the Machine and Gucci's global face for accessories — reading from the British Romantic poet William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Side B showed a cat's head standing for Bastet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of sex, and brought in the New York rapper A$AP Rocky to read a love letter from Jane Austen's novel Persuasion (you can listen to both on the Gucci app).

That was only the prelude. As always, the 60-plus menswear and 40-plus womenswear looks on the Fall/Winter 2017 runway ran through the fashionable elements of every era, ancient to contemporary, and left viewers to take what they liked.

If you care about the classic pieces of decades past, look for the printed jackets born in the 1950s, the pom-pom wool hats of the 1960s, the oversized sunglasses of the 1970s. If you care about classic film and television imagery, you could find among the models a tarot-card figure wrapped in a Chinese-style robe with a mustache penciled on, a punk singer in ripped jeans and a white T-shirt with heavy eye makeup, an opera lover in Victorian velvet finery, and a gypsy woman piled with sequins in every color.

And if you like to fuss over details and drop erudite references, the show notes spelled out the Latin names of the plants and animals newly introduced into the prints, and the long list of quoted philosophers — already running to Roland Barthes, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida and Guy Debord — had gained Deleuze and Mead. Lines like "to see the person as a unique individual is to see the person as manifold becoming" and "the parliament of selves" were used to explain the show's core idea: gender ambiguity and multiple selves.

Boiling these dazzling images and concepts down to keywords is not actually hard: nostalgia, mythology, nature, genderlessness, ambiguity. Together they make up what Alessandro Michele means by "modernity."

But there is a better question than which concepts Michele has woven together. Faced with collection after collection that piles up existing ideas and vintage elements like a museum display, where exactly is the "revolutionary" quality, the "spirit of the times" that fashion critics keep talking about? And why does it keep delivering the kind of numbers luxury businesses have not seen in a long time?

Alessandro Michele and Demna Gvasalia aren't revolutionaries, because they haven't broken any rules

"Fashion's rules are set by the industry as a whole: fashion editors, designers, and the big companies that finance the supply chain," Alexander Fury wrote in the piece praising Gucci and Vetements. He never said what those rules were, but he did set out what he took to be the innovation: "Fashion has always been fervently obsessed with the whole outfit, but both Gvasalia and Michele place tremendous emphasis on individuality, including the independence of single pieces... And unlike before, their clothes don't change much from season to season."

In short: individuality, and continuity. Going by the coverage of the show that has just ended, "genderlessness" could count as a new highlight too — and the turnover of Gucci's brand ambassadors in the Chinese market illustrates the shift nicely. Li Bingbing was replaced by Li Yuchun, and the first exhibition Michele staged in Shanghai after taking the job brought in Dou Jingtong as a guest.

But individuality and continuity ought to be the luxury industry's baseline demands on a top designer. "Fashion is plagiarism" is not wrong, in a sense: the handful of houses at the top create the trends, and mid-market and mass brands copy them downward. The reason you can buy pleated skirts in every texture this season goes back in part to Issey Miyake's first Spring/Summer show in Paris 23 years ago, built around his Pleats technique. The reason girls can carry the classic quilted bag in every color and size is that Karl Lagerfeld redesigned the 2.55 in the 1980s for women just entering the workforce.

Genderlessness is even less of an avant-garde idea. Riccardo Tisci, the Givenchy creative director who first put a transgender model on a runway; Rick Owens, who draws on the sensitive but masculine Neil Young; Raf Simons, who favors frail, waifish models — "genderless" was already fashionable on runways from the late 1990s into the early 2000s.

On design alone, Michele and Gvasalia both look more like excavators of classic elements, and nostalgists. Michele had a father who loved art and antiques and a mother who could rattle off the Hollywood stars of the 1950s, and so he mixes a love of the classical with a love of contemporary pop. By The New Yorker's account, his home is a prototype of the Gucci runway, full of eighteenth-century hair-curling machines, antique oil paintings and taxidermy. His own dress takes its cues from flea markets and from museums and galleries across European cities. Whether he sets a show in New York's Chelsea, in Westminster Abbey in England, or in the Parthenon in Greece (an attempt that fell through not long ago), what Michele is manufacturing is a romance of another time and another place — a "temporal elsewhere."

The same goes for Demna Gvasalia. As we analyzed in an earlier article, those sleeves that hang down to the legs, the asymmetric silhouettes, the deconstructed jeans, the logos that stand for consumerism — these are what happened after the work of Western trendsetters like Martin Margiela, Raf Simons and Adidas reached Russia and was parodied and repackaged by working-class young people. Traveling back west, it carried the same romance of the other.

The people who buy these clothes have not changed much either, of course. If political correctness has become a requirement of social life, then luxury goods that absorb genderless ideas and street elements offer a convenient coat to those at the top of the social order. The rich on Madison Avenue expressed elegance in the 1950s and '60s with a Givenchy little black dress and a Tiffany diamond ring; now they pair a loose Rick Owens jacket with a Chanel bag. These designs make them look as if they had philosophy, history and the current mood at their fingertips, and they expose just as clearly how frail a self becomes when it leans this hard on clothes.

None of this has anything to do with innovation. In fact, Michele has never claimed anywhere that he was trying to innovate. In an interview with the South China Morning Post he said: "I'm not interested in rules, and I'm not interested in the future. Sometimes people in design get too obsessed with what the future is, what modernity is. To me, modernity is the world of the past, because modernity means looking at the future in a traditional way."

How did Alessandro Michele cater to popular taste?

The second half of what the fashion critics said does explain how Gucci has won both praise and sales: Michele caught the spirit of the times.

Look back at the situation before he took over. From 1994 to 2004, Gucci returned to prosperity under Tom Ford. Ford's aesthetic was built on sex appeal — sharp tailoring, mostly dark colors, a cold and glossy high-end sexiness. The taste of the whole 1990s ran the same way. Abercrombie & Fitch, which dressed its stores like nightclubs, and American Apparel, which emphasized the curves of the body, were both born and became popular in those years. Through the 1990s, you could say, sexy was modern and sexy was cool.

Frida Giannini, who succeeded Ford as creative director, carried the approach on. Vogue once described the Gucci of her years as "full of femininity, with a rock-and-roll edge, and incredibly cool."

But consumers after the internet economy took off at the turn of the century were no longer what they had been. Taste had fragmented and multiplied; visual communication had become extremely important; young people and the middle class had more money and more say in how fashion was bought; and once the plain, understated Normcore trend swept in, straightforward sex-appeal marketing suddenly stopped working in Europe and the US.

Michele saw the problem at the time. By W Magazine's account, he felt Gucci was chasing an imagined consumer who no longer existed. "Tom's core idea was that sexy is like a god — you have to worship it and want to become it. But what do girls want to become now? That god has changed. They want to be a street goddess and a tender goddess at the same time. Maybe she even wants to be something completely ambiguous."

No one knows what Gucci's new CEO, Marco Bizzarri, and Michele talked about when someone introduced them. What is on the public record is that Bizzarri's attitude moved from doubt to deep trust. "I think he completely understands what Gucci is, and what the consumer wants."

Consumers don't know what they want, but they want everything. That is an extremely common state of mind now, in a time of economic turbulence, unstable politics and saturating social media, and it is the answer Alessandro Michele found. As we noted when we looked at why Jane Austen is popular, young women today share a contradiction with Austen's heroines: they denounce the traditional constraints between the sexes but still value family; they carry the pressure of making a living and look for healing and escape in what they buy. Like the characters Austen wrote, they try to see through the world and satirize it while insisting on a focus on their own lives.

A similar analysis appears in another article about why people insist on finding themselves through fitness: as the future grows less certain, the reliable markers of group identity are gradually being replaced by fluidity, instability and individualism, and "transformation" has become the solution with the lowest barrier to entry.

It also explains why the top ten fashion searches on Google in 2016 included "what is bohemian," "what did people wear in the '90s" and "how to dress like a hippie." Nostalgia is the best shelter and the best reference book, and boho has already lasted on the runways for years. Its subtext is travel, escape, a longing for a languid life, and it can lend a little romance to any body. Lisa Aiken, retail fashion director at Net-a-Porter, told whowhatwear: "Boho is the ultimate expression of fashion escapism. You can't wear it to the office, but the moment you put it on it instantly conjures summer and travel."

So perhaps you could put it this way: what has really changed is not fashion's rules but the psychology and the setting of fashion consumption. Getting dressed is now, more than ever, an outlet for feeling and a medium for finding yourself. Social media's saturation has also made it no longer private, but something that happens on the street every minute and is broadcast online. Buying fashion has taken on a public quality. It gets circulated, judged and layered with every kind of interpretation. Being talked about has come to matter more than innovating, and the brand nobody talks about is the one to fear.

Against that background, ambiguity and illusion became words Michele returned to in interview after interview. "Tomorrow is really an illusion — you don't know how long you'll be on this earth... The purpose of fashion is to create illusion. Everyone just has to create their own illusion, and that's beautiful," he told The New Yorker. "Ambiguity has a particular kind of beauty. Not just gender ambiguity, but any moment when the fact doesn't match your imagination. Who makes the rules? Nobody!" he told the South China Morning Post.

This is exactly why a show that would normally need a few dozen looks has swollen past a hundred: punk, bohemia, the literary, the romantic, philosophy, myth, gender, flora and fauna. The people who used to enforce and renew fashion's rules have lazily handed the power of interpretation back to consumers who have no idea what to do with it, with every kind of concept laid out for the taking. At the same time, every garment and accessory is made highly wearable, orthodox in silhouette and cut; the exaggeration sits mostly in the prints and the styling.

Of course, there is nothing special about digging up old elements. The point of the story Michele tells is not what he dug up but how he shows it to you. Those pale, thin, gender-ambiguous models and the theatrical runway sets are so many blank canvases: you only find out how it looks on your own body once you have bought the thing.

"Alessandro takes clothes that are undeniably beautiful and puts them in an extremely extreme setting. Take a piece home and maybe your grandmother or your mother could wear it too, but put it on a boy and embroider a big green snake on it, and suddenly it's got wit," said Hari Nef, a transgender model who walked the 2016 Gucci show, in an interview with The New Yorker.

A top designer is not supposed to be ambiguous. His job is to work out what the future should look like; he should be the boldest trendsetter of all. But the cleverness of ambiguity lies in handing the question that needs answering back to the audience. Old or young, in love with punk or nostalgic for Victorian flourish, anyone can find a self and find sympathy somewhere in this all-inclusive collection. The images, concepts and philosophical quotations that give fashion critics headaches draw cheers from consumers, generate talk and traffic, and in the end push the sales figures up.

From the moment luxury went mass-market, it became a product forced to balance popular taste

Gucci's popularity is not a special case. Luxury began losing its core spirit decades ago, when it turned corporate.

Look back over Gucci's 96 years and it started as nothing more than a small luggage shop that Guccio Gucci opened in Florence. In Sara G. Forden's account in The House of Gucci, the Allies placed sanctions on Italian industry in the 1930s to protest Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, which forced Gucci to start making handbags. From there it developed its classic diamond print and became a luxury boutique, then opened a New York store in the 1950s that Queen Elizabeth II, Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy visited regularly.

But after Kering bought it in 1999, the chase for sales figures pushed it to start catering to the market. Only then could the story of Tom Ford and the people who followed him unfold.

In fact, luxury started getting cheap a little earlier than that, from the moment the famous logos we all know began covering every product line. To sell more, the brands folded the middle class into their target consumers. According to Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, in the early 1990s Chanel's design director, Karl "Kaiser" Lagerfeld, borrowed a trick from hip-hop kids who mocked white consumer taste with knockoff logos: he put the double-C on necklaces and belts and printed it on everything. LV, Gucci and Dior all absorbed the same idea of remaking an old luxury house with street style. Outlet malls opened everywhere, selling discounted stock and diffusion lines; more entry-level products arrived, including perfume, cosmetics, silk scarves and charms. The manufacturing on some lines was then cut back as well.

"A new group has emerged within the luxury industry, which I call luxury refugees: designers, perfumers and executives. They've grown deeply disillusioned with the greed of the corporatized luxury world and are no longer willing to compromise, so they've broken free and started making niche, independent products in an effort to recapture what drew them to the luxury industry in the first place," writes Dana Thomas, the author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Tom Ford was one of them; when he left Gucci he told Thomas: "Today, fashion luxury brands are within everyone's reach, everything looks the same, and the customers have become mediocre too."

And so consumers who craved something unique while also wanting luxury at a cheap price gave rise to a new branch of the fashion business: vintage.

And so hiring one creative director after another who could cater to a new generation of consumers and lift the sales figures became the norm for luxury brands.

Seen this way, the adulation for Alessandro Michele is only a concentrated expression of these natural results.

Cover image from wmagazine.com and newyorker.com; other images from guardian.com, dazeddigital.com and The New York Times