Alessandro Michele, Milan fashion week’s golden boy, used a cryptic Nabokov quote to set the tone of an otherworldly show
At the entrance to a disused Milanese train depot repurposed for the afternoon as a fairytale boudoir (plush seating cubes in buttoned pink velvet, strip-bar glitter curtains, a throaty undertone of dry ice), each guest arriving for the Gucci catwalk show was handed a pink piece of paper. On it was printed a quote by Vladimir Nabokov: “Literature was not born the day a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big grey wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him.”
Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, likes to layer several characters into an outfit – he himself was dressed for the show in a distinctive Renaissance-biker style that the New Yorker said in a recent profile suggested “a dandy who had run off to join the Hell’s Angels”. And he chose this quote to convey several points.