Gucci Décor: Alessandro Michele’s Archive, Reimagined in Porcelain

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 8 min

For Milan Design Week 2019, Gucci turned a private apartment on Via Santo Spirito into a working demonstration of its Décor collection, a homeware line the house had been building with the Florentine porcelain manufacturer Richard Ginori since 2017. The rooms carried a print with a longer history than the collection itself: Herbarium, Alessandro Michele’s botanical motif, extends a line of Gucci prints turned into objects that runs back to Vittorio Accornero’s 1966 Flora scarf.

---

Gucci did not open a shop for Milan Design Week 2019. It opened an apartment. Across two floors of a building at 19 Via Santo Spirito, in Milan’s Brera district, the house furnished a full domestic set with the pieces from its Décor collection: armchairs, cushions, lighting, and, upstairs, a dining room laid for a meal that would never be eaten. The collection had already existed for eighteen months by that point, produced in partnership with Richard Ginori, the porcelain manufacturer Gucci’s parent company Kering acquired in 2013. What the apartment did was stage it, room by room, the way a person might actually live with it.

The design argument sits underneath that staging. Alessandro Michele’s maximalism, the layered prints and metallic colour that had defined his Gucci since 2015, was never confined to clothing. Herbarium, the botanical print that recurs across the porcelain on show upstairs, belongs to a lineage of Gucci motifs that started on silk in 1966 and has been migrating onto objects ever since. The apartment on Via Santo Spirito was the clearest demonstration yet of where that migration had reached.

A two-storey apartment, built to be lived in

The ground floor held the living room. Armchairs and side tables sat under lighting designed for the collection, arranged around cushions and throws with the eye-and-lightning-bolt print Gucci calls Star Eye. Porcelain pieces from the Mystic Cat line, decorated with a stylised cat’s face, sat alongside them on side tables and shelving. A marble fireplace and a coffered ceiling gave the ground floor the proportions of an actual Milanese apartment rather than a showroom built to look like one, and the walls were lined in printed wallpaper and layered with carpet rather than left as retail white space.

The upper floor was set as a dining room, and it carried the collection’s most literal piece of theatre: a table laid with white Richard Ginori porcelain in the Herbarium print, vintage candelabra, silverware, and a plate of macaroons, as though a dinner party had just been interrupted. Visitors could use a Gucci app to see selected pieces rendered at scale in augmented reality, including versions placed at recognisable points around Milan such as Piazza del Duomo, before deciding what they might actually buy.

The choice to build two floors of rooms rather than a single showroom space matters because Gucci Décor was never sold as a coordinated collection with one fixed look. It was designed to be assembled the way any home is assembled, unevenly and over time, and an apartment was the only format that could demonstrate that.

A collection that was two years old by the time Milan saw it

The Milan apartment was a staging, not a debut. Gucci and Richard Ginori had already introduced the Décor collection in September 2017, distributing it through Gucci’s existing boutiques and online store rather than through a dedicated homeware retail line. The porcelain in that first wave already carried the Herbarium print, rendered in green on white or black on white, alongside pieces finished with bees, butterflies and cockerel heads modelled in relief. Four scented candles, named Inventum, Fumus, Herbosum and Esotericum, were part of the same release.

What the Milan apartment did, eighteen months on, was give that existing collection a stage that matched its ambition. Milan Design Week, which ran from 9 April to 14 April 2019, is built around exactly this kind of citywide presentation: brands take spaces across the city to show work alongside the trade fair at Fiera Milano, and the Via Santo Spirito apartment stayed open to visitors beyond the week itself, into the end of June 2019. That extended run, well past the design week crowds, is itself a signal of how the collection was meant to be understood: not as a seasonal design-week installation but as a retail proposition that needed the room to make its case properly.

Richard Ginori’s porcelain, and a handshake across three centuries

Richard Ginori’s part in this is worth explaining on its own terms, because the manufactory long predates the fashion house it now works for. It was founded in 1735 by the Marquis Carlo Andrea Ginori at his family’s villa in Doccia, near Florence, in what is now Sesto Fiorentino, making it one of the oldest porcelain manufacturers still operating in Europe. Gio Ponti served as its creative director between 1923 and 1933, a period that won the manufactory the Grand Prix at the 1925 Paris International Exposition and set the template for its 20th-century design language. Kering, Gucci’s parent company, acquired Richard Ginori in 2013, and Michele took on the role of artistic director across the pairing. The company would rename itself Ginori 1735 in 2020, a year after the Milan apartment closed, formally trading its 19th-century commercial name for its founding date.

That history is why the pairing works as more than a licensing deal. Michele’s prints needed a manufacturer capable of firing intricate multicolour decoration onto fine bone china at scale and with consistency, and Richard Ginori had been doing exactly that, for exactly this kind of client, since before the Gucci name existed. The porcelain on the dining table in Via Santo Spirito was not a print applied to a generic blank. It came from a workshop with 284 years of practice in getting that kind of decoration right.

Herbarium and the house’s oldest surviving print

Herbarium’s own history reaches back further than the Décor collection itself, and further than Michele’s tenure at Gucci. The house’s first true archive print was Flora, an intricate botanical design of flowers, fruit and insects across 37 colours, drawn by the artist and set designer Vittorio Accornero in 1966. Rodolfo Gucci commissioned it as a gift for Grace Kelly, after her visit to the Milan boutique, wanting an alternative to a bouquet that would not wilt. Accornero, drawing on Botticelli’s Primavera and the tradition of Dutch vanitas still life, built the print from flora across all four seasons. It first appeared on a silk scarf, then moved onto mini dresses by 1969, into Gucci’s first ready-to-wear collection in 1981, and through decades of reissues under successive creative directors.

Herbarium is Michele’s own botanical print for the Décor collection, not a direct redrawing of Accornero’s original, but it inherits the same underlying idea: a densely worked botanical illustration, designed first as a flat print, made physical as an object a person keeps rather than wears. Flora made that journey onto silk in 1966. Herbarium made it onto Richard Ginori porcelain in 2017, and the dining table at Via Santo Spirito, laid with Herbarium plates and vintage silverware, was the clearest possible demonstration of a pattern completing a fifty-year-old habit at Gucci: a print conceived as decoration becomes an object worth setting a table with.

Star Eye and Mystic Cat carried prints from the runway to the table

The two motifs downstairs have their own, shorter journeys, and they show the same mechanism working faster. Mystic Cat, the stylised feline print applied to porcelain boxes and trays in the apartment’s living room, first appeared as a silk scarf print for Gucci’s Cruise 2018 collection, worn and photographed months before it was fired onto a porcelain lid. Star Eye, the eye-and-lightning-bolt motif used across trinket trays and ashtrays in the same room, belongs to the same visual language Michele had been developing across Gucci’s accessories through 2018 and 2019, in which eyes, stars and celestial imagery recurred as a signature nearly as consistent as the interlocking G.

Seeing Mystic Cat’s route from scarf to porcelain box, in particular, is a useful way to read the whole collection. Gucci Décor was not designed as a separate homeware brand with its own visual identity. It was built by taking prints already circulating through the ready-to-wear and accessories lines and finding out what they looked like fired onto china, cast in resin, or woven into a cushion. The apartment on Via Santo Spirito made that process visible, because a visitor could stand in one room, surrounded by a print they might already own on a scarf, and see it again on a teapot.

A Paris paper studio matched Richard Ginori’s own calendar

One further credit in the apartment has had less attention than it deserves. The wallpaper lining the rooms was not a Gucci house pattern applied by a standard commercial printer. It came from Antoinette Poisson, the Paris studio founded in 2012 by Jean-Baptiste Martin and Vincent Farelly, who built their practice on reviving papier dominoté, the hand-decorated paper that lined French interiors and small objects through the 18th century, before wallpaper as it is understood today existed. Their method uses engraved copper plates for the outline, hand-mixed ink worked on marble, and colour brushed through stencils by hand, on paper sourced from a mill in France’s Charente region that still makes it from recycled linen and hemp.

That detail lines the apartment up with an interior logic that goes beyond décor. Richard Ginori was founded in 1735. Antoinette Poisson’s papers revive a decorative tradition from precisely that same century, remade using the same hand tools an 18th-century workshop would have used. Two heritage crafts from the same historical moment, one in porcelain and one in paper, were brought into the same rooms under Michele’s direction, and the apartment’s dense, layered look was built as much from that pairing of techniques as from any single print.

Final thoughts

The Gucci Décor apartment worked because it refused to separate the collection from the house’s own history. Every print in it had already lived somewhere else, on a scarf, a dress, an accessory, before it reached porcelain, and the apartment made that continuity legible by putting Herbarium plates on a table set with real silverware rather than on a plinth. Richard Ginori’s 284 years of porcelain-making and Antoinette Poisson’s revival of 18th-century French paper gave that continuity a material weight that a purely graphic presentation could not have managed. The apartment on Via Santo Spirito was a demonstration of a simple idea, tested at full domestic scale: a house with an archive as deep as Gucci’s has more than enough material to furnish a home, without inventing a single new pattern.