“I’ve always thought of my collections as movies,” the designer said

Alessandro Michele writes in a message that appears under the photographs of Gucci Exquisite’s newest advertising campaign, “A dress, for me, is never just a piece of cloth, but than the medium through which we may tell who we decide to be […]. I’ve always viewed my collections as movies because of this.”It was no secret that Michele was passionate about movies; from Fellini Satyricon to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he had always drawn inspiration from the fantasies and horrors of directors and filmmakers all over the world. The Gucci Exquisite campaign, however, is centered on just one author, Stanley Kubrick, who is described by the company’s creative director as a “cineasta philosopher” who is capable of “constructing ever-in excess stories of meaning, conveying narratives capable of crossing borders and setting labels on fire.”

Another intriguing similarity between his own work and the legendary director’s lies in their respective cults and approaches to pop culture. Michele continues, “The biggest questions about the meaning of life become pop images. Everything becomes an iconic image, symbolically refined but able to settle within a decidedly popular culture.After all, I also went with Kubrick for it. Kubrick as a pop icon, the same pop that Michele, in a maximalist and sentimental manner, rereads and rewrites the categories of the centenary brand he is in charge of. As a result, clothes “transform into creative prosthesis functional to the telling of a story” and have an enhanced existence.

And in fact, the iconic images of Shining, Clockworks orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut, and Barry Lyndon blend flawlessly with the multifaceted aesthetics of the Exquisite collection: For example, the adidas Victorian-style dress peeks out among the gentlemen of the 18th century English, furs and pearls appear next to the masked cultists of Eyes Wide Shut, and hybridization of figures and suggestions mixed in an effervescence of themes, icons, and images that is only apparent in the Exquisite collection.Kubrick’s images are now “as iconic as the Sistine Chapel, the Virgin of the Rocks, or the Simpsons,” just as Michele experimented for this collection with instantly known pop culture symbols like adidas logos.