Gucci's Creative Director Brings His Touring Exhibition to Beijing — We Talked to the Curator

It isn't a very systematic exhibition, but it does let you get close to this designer's worldview.

As we reported earlier this month, Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele is showing in China again, two years after his last exhibition. Last year A Magazine Curated By, often called Belgium's leading fashion magazine, invited Alessandro to be guest editor and published a 250-page issue on the theme "Blind for Love." The touring exhibition of the same name, traveling to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taipei, is curated by A Magazine editor-in-chief Dan Thawley and works as a three-dimensional version of that issue.

The tour reached Beijing from March 30 to April 9.

Next to "No Longer/Not Yet," the exhibition Alessandro Michele staged in Shanghai in 2015, "Blind for Love" feels less like a formal, straight-backed show than a display of the designer's personal tastes.

The venue is 77 Theatre on Meishuguan Houjie in Beijing's Dongcheng district — a building converted from the old Beijing Offset Printing Factory, more than 60 years old, with a footprint of only 322 square meters.

Most of the objects sit in the first section, the Cabinet of Curiosity, and there are only a dozen or so of them: mostly paintings, photographs, sculptures, and tapestries that already appeared in A Magazine Curated by Alessandro Michele. The second section is the only part that differs between the three stops, showing work by three young women artists — Petra Collins in Hong Kong, Coco Capitán in Beijing, and Gia Coppola in Taipei. In the third section you can look back over everything you have just seen, surrounded by three screens.

On the whole, this is not a very systematic exhibition. Work made by the designer's friends around the Blind for Love theme is mixed in with his own hobbies, and without a careful explanation few visitors would quickly see how any given piece connects to the theme.

It does, though, help you understand the worldview behind the dizzying images and metaphors on Gucci's runway. On one side you can see Alessandro Michele's manic fetish for antiques: the manuscript of a novel by the 18th-century French woman writer Fanny de Beauharnais (the Blind for Love slogan that turns up all over the shows is taken from that novel's title), vintage tapestries from the 1930s fabric house Fortuny (a source for Gucci's prints), 19th-century German white porcelain dolls, and egret feathers — think of the accessories on the runway.

On the other side, the subjects he cares about line up neatly with themes that are no longer avant-garde but are politically safe and easy to sell. LGBT rights, for one: Polaroids of the transgender model Hari Nef, a photo series modeled by Justin Vivian Bond, who is transgender, the garden of Sissinghurst Castle, home of Vita Sackville-West, the lover of the British writer Virginia Woolf, and the portrait of Oscar Wilde with his lover Bosie. The female gaze and feminism, for another: most of the work on show was made by women. Then the millennial generation and social media: two of the three invited women artists are only 24 and the third is 29, and Unskilled Worker, who painted that Oscar Wilde portrait, was — like Gucci Ghost — discovered by Alessandro on Instagram.

Consumers do not necessarily follow any of this. On the evening of March 29, when the exhibition opened, VIP customers from Beijing's big luxury malls were invited in. Two women in their twenties who work in PR and earn more than 10,000 yuan a month had brought out a Gucci double-G handbag and a Dionysus bag for the occasion, and looked thrilled. They told QDaily the exhibition had deepened their understanding of Gucci. "Understanding of what?" "I can't say exactly. His things are always colorful and pretty, and there's some history and culture behind them."

But for a luxury group that cares more about sales figures than about creativity, leaving consumers with that impression is already enough.

It is worth noting that this exhibition is also A Magazine's first formal public appearance in China.

Dan Thawley, who curated it, has been editor-in-chief since 2010 and also writes for BoF, French Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, Wallpaper, and other outlets. We took the chance to talk with him about working with Alessandro Michele, how to run an independent magazine, and what he makes of the fashion industry today.

Q: QDaily

D: Dan Thawley

On This Exhibition

Q: How did the collaboration with Alessandro Michele start?

D: We got in touch with Alessandro after we finished the Thom Browne issue in March 2016. What interested us most was how he had brought his own personal outlook into Gucci as a brand. He is full of curiosity, and he listens. It took us about a year, talking every day, and we brought in more than 50 contributors to make the magazine.

Our final aim was to do what Alessandro likes to do: mix content from different eras and different forms to create unexpected combinations and collisions, and to build a dialogue between cultures.

Q: Why make it a trilogy?

D: First, every stop has to keep two sections, the cabinet of curiosity and the cinema room. They are the thread running through the whole exhibition, and together they are a condensed introduction to and summary of A Magazine curated by Alessandro Michele.

Second, the middle section, the Photographer Room, always goes to a young woman artist who contributed to this issue. Each of them interprets natural beauty in her own way, and what a real, imperfect image of a woman looks like, which is a contribution to the young women's movement.

Q: Why put so much weight on young women?

D: Most of the people we work with are millennial photographers. They grew up in the digital age and want to break the fixation on the perfect image, to overturn the dominance of white models, heavy retouching, and the idea that thin is beautiful, and to use pictures to look for beauty in people of different ages, races, body types, and skin colors. They have also brought documentary photography and art photography into fashion.

Women photographers give us a way into women's culture. Men have always dominated the fashion world and the history of fashion. But we are in a new era now, and these barriers need to come down. Of course, plenty of fine male photographers contributed to the magazine too, like Ryan McGinley and David Sims, but the question worth discussing right now is how women see each other.

Q: How do you decide which woman photographer to invite in each city?

D: Coco Capitán lived in Beijing for a while and did quite a few art projects here, so it is something of a homecoming for her. The paintings on show this time were finished here in Beijing as well.

We invited Petra Collins in Hong Kong because she had just finished a show at MoMA in New York, so it made sense to have her take part during Art Basel Hong Kong. Gia Coppola closes things out in Taipei — we thought the collision between her Los Angeles feel and the city of Taipei would be interesting.

Q: Is there any continuity between this exhibition and "No Longer/Not Yet"?

D: No. "No Longer/Not Yet" was tied more closely to contemporary art, while "Blind for Love" has more to do with Alessandro Michele's personal aesthetic world — you can see the research he does behind Gucci. This exhibition is not Alessandro Michele looking outward; it is about how he looks inward.

Q: Some people explain Gucci's popularity by saying Alessandro Michele happens to match the way people consume fashion now — popular elements from different eras mixed together, pleasing to the eye, easy to share. Do you see it that way?

D: Plenty of creative directors work this way now, reassembling and reinterpreting fashion in a postmodern manner. What makes Alessandro Michele more convincing is that he combines things through his own eyes, rather than doing what many designers do, mixing elements made by other designers in the same period or just before, and then claiming, "this is new."

He is fairly honest about treating history as a textbook, placing references that span centuries into other eras and other settings — images from painting, sculpture, and mythology, and nods to 1980s punk photography. What comes out of it is a new kind of cultural collision.

Q: One line of criticism holds that a top designer's job is to look forward, not backward. What do you think?

D: I don't think anyone can say with any confidence that in 2017 a designer's job is to show what the future looks like. People should understand that a designer's job is to inspire, to make things that amaze, and in the end to sell.

I think Alessandro Michele does all of that, and beyond it he helps young people today understand history and culture better. A lot of designers just copy and paste on the surface, and that really is no help at all.

On A Magazine Curated By

Q: A Magazine is 16 years old. What have you changed to keep it going, and what have you kept?

D: The magazine itself hasn't changed much. I joined as editor-in-chief in 2010, and I've watched the team get younger and spread across more cities, New York and Paris among them, but our inspiration still comes from the people who came before us, which keeps the quality and the style consistent.

The whole era is going digital, so the content has to be more global as well. We can't only look at Belgium; we have to keep an eye on emerging artists and photographers worth watching anywhere in the world.

We have opened social accounts and built a website, but one thing about A Magazine has not moved: what we do is not runway reviews or news, it is more like looking at creativity from backstage, and we don't treat each season's fashion as all that important.

Q: How do you decide who becomes guest editor?

D: We talk to different designers to see who has a reasonably complete worldview, one that reaches beyond fashion into art, design, architecture, photography, film, music, food and so on. That is what makes a magazine interesting.

Then it is a matter of pacing and balance: how to combine well-known and emerging contributors, men and women, different ages and different styles, so the content is distinctive and varied but still reads as one smooth whole.

Apart from the format there are no restrictions at all. There is always a letter first introducing who the guest editor is, then the guest editor writes a letter setting out the core idea. After that it is wide open.

Q: How does A Magazine make money?

D: Our main source of income is the same as any other magazine's: advertising. A designer serving as guest editor tends to attract brands. And some brands don't want to simply display their new perfume or shoes; they choose us because they think we can make an ad beautiful and different.

Curating events like this one also matters, because it shows what else this team can do. Beyond events there is publishing. Last year, for example, we worked with Coco Capitán and Paco Rabanne on a book sponsored by Paco Rabanne, edited by creative director Julien Dossena, with photography by Coco Capitán.

We explore different ways of making money while protecting A Magazine's own style, and we don't have to confine ourselves to high fashion.

For now, though, we have no plan to raise the print run. We still want to keep our sales channels to museums, bookshops, boutiques, the website of the concept store Colette, and our own site. That covers the key cities around the world and lets us control the quality of distribution.

Q: Which issue do you admire most?

D: Before my time, the Martin Margiela issue and the one with Undercover's creative director Jun Takahashi were the classics, because they best reflect the magazine's punk spirit and also stand for the character of Belgian design. Since I became editor-in-chief I am more easily swayed by friendship than by the content itself — Stephen Jones, for instance. Those people have also brought new collaborations to the magazine.

On the Fashion Industry

Q: When people discuss how the fashion industry is changing, the same few topics keep coming up: the decline of fashion week, fashion moving its center of gravity from product to marketing. Any thoughts on those arguments?

D: Fashion has exploded into an industry worth tens of billions, packed with fashion at every level — high fashion, street fashion, high-street fashion. From haute couture down to the mass market, this business is everywhere.

It is hard to sum up these changes and the reasons behind them, but one thing is certain: social media has permanently changed the fashion industry. It has made fashion fashionable as never before, and pulled in young people, and people of every age who had no interest in fashion at all, until it became a very important part of their lives. We look at ourselves and at each other more and more often, we produce endless mirror images and pictures, and we recycle the same things. That has set different tiers of fashion copying one another, and it has made originality unusually rare.

It is hard to argue that people have stopped making good products; in fact there are brands making a great deal of money at every level. On the good side, fashion has finally become open to everyone, but holding on to individuality has got harder. You have to be sharp enough and firm enough to know what you need and what you like in the face of such a bewildering range of choices, or you end up as neither one thing nor the other.

The same goes for brands. They have to know their own identity, stay original and hold a distinct point of view to succeed, otherwise everything becomes the same. What is interesting is how openly you can see brands copying each other, and not only from the bottom up — it happens between equals too. You can see a lot of Yohji Yamamoto in Celine, and in a Paris design studio you will find things you have already seen in New York or Milan.

Stylists and art directors probably play a part in that. I call them micro-influencers. They are all clever, and they keep an enormous library of reference material that they reuse from client to client, applying similar styles and techniques. One reason Gucci has held on to its own style is that Alessandro Michele doesn't use a stylist — he does it all himself.

All this copying is a pity, but it isn't hard to understand. People need to make money.

Q: Some argue that social media has amplified the fashion blogger and weakened the fashion critic. As a critic yourself, how do you see it?

D: I think the media have always had two problems. One is that media and brands use and buy each other. The other is that some people write very sharp criticism without knowing anything about other markets. What frustrates me is that fashion criticism lacks a global view and lacks respect: some very powerful people don't understand why a designer makes things for certain people, or how much craft matters, and others pass judgment far too quickly.

I don't believe in positive criticism either — the reviews fashion media write about their own advertisers. But I think the digital age offers other ways of handling this. Independent magazines, for instance, should have their own critical thinking, while a magazine like Vogue should support fashion the way it always has, instead of pretending it can be critical.

In short: be more transparent, more ethical. What I can do is this: I can talk publicly about the brands I work with, Gucci and Chloé for example, but I won't write runway reviews of them while we are working together. That is my rule.

Q: You mentioned that A Magazine watches for new talent. Do you have advice for young designers?

D: Mass production always puts young designers in a bind, because they don't have the economies of scale that big brands rely on. So a young designer shouldn't try to build a collection with a huge number of SKUs. Make fewer, better pieces, pay attention to craft, and hold a clear point of view. That attracts more buyers, who don't have much budget set aside for young designers in the first place.

The environment is of course harder now: more than 200 million more people have crowded into fashion design in recent years, everyone goes to fashion school, everyone wants to be a fashion designer. Which makes doing a few things well, and staying true to yourself, matter even more.

Cover image and photos from Gucci's official WeChat account and A Magazine's website.