Vogue magazine’s Hamish Bowles interviews Gucci’s new creative director Alessandro Michele, describing him as ‘a lot like the woman he champions: daring, curiously compelling — and with a streak of mystery and eccentricity’.

“Fashion is about creating emotion—it’s not necessarily rational,” explains new Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri, whose first scheduled hour-long meeting with Michele—at the designer’s apartment—segued into three hours discussing the future of the brand. “I thought, Why should I look for someone else when he can translate the heritage—and when the values of Gucci are in his veins?”

The Gucci design team has recently led a peripatetic life. Ford centered it in London, where he lives, while Giannini moved operations to Florence (birthplace of Guccio Gucci, who founded the company in 1921)—and much of the business side is based in Milan, where the company is in the process of relocating to a Mussolini-era aircraft hangar where Michele will stage his collections. Michele, though, prefers Rome. “There is something about the culture of the fifties and the cinema,” he says of his hometown. “But I also need to travel. I need to go to London. You have everything there—present, past, future, exhibitions, theater. And real eccentricity is still very much alive with the English—the kids in the East End, beautiful English old ladies.” He also loves contemporary Los Angeles dressing (“the way they put things together—it’s not chic, but it’s inspiring”) and New York, where he shops vintage stores and where he will present his 2016 resort collection—“a couture show in a garage,” as he explains. “I love couture, but the other side of me loves the street, and I think the mix of these two can create something new. When I go to New York and London, I love to see how very brave the young people are—they have no rules. Even the superchic ladies of the past, like Princess Irene Galitzine, had supermodern attitudes. Today they’d all be into street style.”

Tami Williams & Mica Arganaraz are styled by Camilla Nickerson in images by Jamie Hawkesworth