Alessandro Michele has made no secret of his obsession with Hollywood. He even staged Gucci’s SS22 Love Parade on the boulevard that neighbours the iconic star-studded walk of fame, dishing out nods to Edith Head and Marilyn Monroe in a swirl of feathered pageantry.

Today, this affinity for the silver screen culminates in a striking ode to the directorial greatness of one of Hollywood’s best men: Stanley Kubrick. We’re talking gym-rats pumping iron in the retro-futuristic locale of A Clockwork Orange’s horror house, a model playing with toy cars on the punchy, hexagonal floors of The Shining’s Overlook hotel in a tri-striped Gucci-das balaclava, and puff-gowned jaunts to the croquet field a la Barry Lyndon, the works.

In a note attached to the Mert and Marcus-photographed campaign, imagining the brand’s latest collection with Adidas besides imitation Shelley Duvall’s and Eyes Wide Shit Nicole Kidman’s, Michele speaks of total admiration for Kubrick’s immersive, storytelling abilities, especially when they pertain to such vastly different subjects. “His experimental drive goes beyond any possible categorization,” continues the designer.

“Every film, in fact, digests the manifold souls where dystopia meets parody, drama becomes human comedy, horror looks like a psycho-philosophic treatise, the feeling of truth evolves into the uncanny. Kubrick was, in essence, a real sculptor of genres: the “cross-genre” director, ahead of his time. His ability to build stories that exceed significance, crossing borders and setting labels on fire, has always been deeply inspiring to me.”

The accompanying FW22 collection, Exquisite, saw Michele continue his career-long mingling of high and low under the direction of Milena Canonero, a dear friend of designer who worked closely on the project to revisit “some of the scenes that hailed her as undisputed star in the history of costume design.” And after tearing apart, dissecting and reassembling some of her best work, sending visions of tulle through spaceship interiors or leaving spiky handbags in shiny green bathrooms, we deem the results Academy Award-worthy. Who knows, maybe Michele is finally ready to don the director’s hat – or Clockwork bowler – himself.