The 5 best locations in Rome where Alessandro Michele has taken us over the years Between lookbooks, livestreams, villas, and museums

This morning came the news that the next Valentino show for the FW26 collection will be held in Rome, in a truly exceptional location: Palazzo Barberini. A choice that was, all things considered, easy to anticipate from Alessandro Michele who is perhaps, together with the late Valentino Garavani, the designer most closely linked to the city of Rome that pop culture knows. Of course, the Eternal City has been the backdrop for countless fashion shows over the years, from Fendi’s at the Trevi Fountain to those of Valentino and Dolce&Gabbana, respectively at Trinità dei Monti and Castel Sant’Angelo. But during his years at Gucci, Michele always showed us other sides of Rome.

The different facets of Rome were not only protagonists of fashion shows. But they were the backdrops for auteur lookbooks, the stage for the various digital show formats that Michele experimented with during the lockdown. Alessandro Michele’s Rome is less touristic and more, so to speak, esoteric, made up of places where reality seems suspended in favor of an almost magical and mysterious atmosphere.

Of course, in two of the “Roman” lookbooks, namely those of the Pre-Fall 2020 and 2021 collections, the city is also a protagonist but purely as a backdrop, not as the main character. The locations we will talk about, on the other hand, all share the characteristic of being true characters within the story told by each collection.

1.      Capitoline Museums – Gucci Cruise 2020

The only true fashion show in our roundup, the Gucci Cruise 2020 was decidedly monumental at the time. The Capitoline Museums were completely closed off, hordes of celebrities and influencers descended on Rome like so many Visigoths, and anticipation was sky-high. Unlike other shows in historic locations organized by Michele, however, this fashion show was different because it took place practically in semi-darkness lit by electric torches.

A choice that seemed strange at the time but which, in retrospect, contributed to giving the show a certain ghostly atmosphere, where the vibrant colors loved by the designer mingled with reminiscences of Roman togas and where, above all, Michele’s “political” commitment began, as on this occasion he debuted the now-famous jacket on whose back one could read the words “My body, my choice”.

2.      Palazzo Sacchetti – Gucci Resort 2021

The enormous late-Mannerist mansion enclosed between the Tiber and Corso Vittorio Emanuele II was the protagonist of Epilogue, more an entire project than a simple show or presentation. The idea of the collection was to have the creatives of the Gucci team wear their own designs, presenting them during a 12-hour livestream that would show, instead of a fashion show, the preparations for the lookbook shoot. A kind of behind-the-scenes that becomes the spectacle itself. Serving as the backdrop to everything were the salons, the gardens but also the back rooms and secondary spaces of the magnificent palace.

And even though the palace itself did not appear in the final lookbook, Palazzo Sacchetti remained, together with Campo Boario, the location of the Gucci Epilogue campaign shot for the occasion by the D’Innocenzo Brothers, at the time unofficial ambassadors of the brand and who had already published the photographic book Farmacia Notturna in 2019 with the brand’s contribution.

3.      Casina delle Civette – Pre-Fall 2018

One side of Rome always loved by Alessandro Michele is the dark and dreamlike one often evoked in the Roman films of Dario Argento. And it is easy to understand why: the “estranging” Rome of films like Profondo Rosso and Inferno, that of the mausoleum of Santa Costanza or the Coppedè District, ultimately represents a kind of architectural pastiche of different styles and eras that finds an immediate reflection in Michele’s eclectic fashion. Which also lacks no touch of fantasy, given that the Rome of Dario Argento’s films is often not even Rome but a mix of Turin, Perugia, Bologna locations and so on.

Beyond the declared tributes to Argento, however, the lookbook of the Gucci Pre-Fall 2018 takes place partly in the Casina delle Civette, built in the mid-19th century by order of Prince Alessandro Torlonia, and then transformed into the version we know today starting from 1908 by Giovanni Torlonia Jr. Only from 1916 onwards were the decorations depicting owls added that gave the house its name. Here too echoing the eclecticism, the love of stratification (often idiosyncratic) on which Michele has always based his work.

4.      Galleria della Leda at Villa Albani Torlonia –  Gucci Cruise 2020 Men's Lookbook / Ωοτοκία (Oviparity) by Yorgos Lanthimos

Another location and another presentation format and collaboration chosen by Michele: the art book. The collection, in fact, is the same Cruise 2020 seen at the Capitoline Museums, but the location now is the Galleria della Leda at Villa Albani Torlonia which takes its name from a Roman statue of Leda that is a Roman copy of a Greek original, i.e. one of those “replicas” without which the memory of the originals would have been lost.

A concept very dear to Michele, who has always returned to the idea of replicating by re-signifying, of the copy superimposed and juxtaposed. On this occasion, therefore, on the one hand the men’s lookbook of the collection was presented in June 2019, while in November 2019 came an entire photographic book named Ωοτοκία (Oviparity) signed by Yorgos Lanthimos in his classic hallucinatory style where the models moved among the real statues and other elderly actors covered in white dust simulating the texture of marble.

5.      Cinecittà – Gucci FW21

Anniversary, music video, fashion show, collaboration: the FW21 season was for Gucci that of the brand’s centenary, and the brand was more than prepared with a series of collaborations, activations and limited-edition capsules. The Roman location chosen for the FW21 digital show (we were still in lockdown) is perhaps invisible but it is not a frame, indeed, it is the very premise of this “hybrid” fashion show. The location in question is in fact the Cinecittà studios, where Michele collaborated with Floria Sigismondi.

The entire music video and campaign for the season, which took the name Gucci Aria, is in fact a fashion show shot inside a white tunnel full of cameras that, however, at the end completely transforms into a huge flowery garden where the models of the collection float, precisely, in the air in a moment halfway between surrealism and certain mythological frescoes that decorate many Roman loggias and galleries.