The collection featured a collaboration with Adidas, whose influence on especially European sportswear in the 1970s and ’80s would have been an unavoidable element in Michele’s formative tapestry. “Adidas introduced elegance in sportswear. I was thinking about men’s suits and tracksuits and sportswear, and tried to interpret it my way. The result might seem easy but the idea is really powerful,” he said. That was no exaggeration. While mixing sartorial and sporty codes – such as the tailored tracksuit hybrids and sporty evening gowns on Michele’s runway – isn’t revolutionary in contemporary fashion, the European roots of Adidas made these looks different to the American elements of sportswear we usually see in fashion. Side-by-side with his oversized chequerboard and stripy lurex suits, opulent jacquard coats, and all those logos and checks, there was undeniably a classic gangster vibe to the way Michele worked his Adidas components. But there was something so retro-Euro-’80s about these concoctions, which nailed the naivety with which our continent adapted these American influences in the ’80s, using our own brands.

It continued Michele’s fling with retro remakes

“What you have seen is just an experiment, a never-ending process,” Michele said of his Adidas proposals. “The idea was to break some codes through the sportswear. l looked at a picture of Madonna from ’83 where she was wearing an Adidas dress that had never been produced by them, but by a curator. This is now very normal – fashion has left the atelier – but looking at this picture, I was thinking about the kaleidoscope of things you see in the street.” The idea of the ready-made has long been present in the work of Michele, who already partnered with Dapper Dan, the Harlem designer who originally created a lot of the ‘curated’ logo pieces that appeared in the ’80s in the vein of Madonna’s Adidas dress. Like Virgil Abloh’s collaboration on Nike’s Air Force 1 trainers for Louis Vuitton last year, putting these brands on a luxury runway is a way for high fashion to recognise the deep-rooted influence of the communities and subcultures who pioneered the so-called “streetwear” everybody wears today. It’s important these things don’t just end up in a marketing machine, just like the idea of ‘gender-fluidity’. “This is what I am. It’s not a marketing operation,” Michele concurred, on the topic of the latter.

Accessories mixed the Adidas and Gucci logos

In the wealth of impressions that hit Michele’s runway – lit with clubby strobe lights and scored with a nostalgic but epic soundtrack including “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat and “Fade to Grey” by Visage – some pretty epic accessories materialised, too. Large shopping bags with bamboo handles were covered in spikes, studs or Adidas stripes that echoed Gucci’s own. Laced riding boots with big gold buttons down the side proposed a genderless trope. And hats emblazoned with the Adidas iconography – from baseball caps to swimming caps and berets – topped off almost every look, cementing the ‘80s sensibility that permeated the show.