Gucci was back in its week-opening spot today after a season as the Milan closer, and Alessandro Michele got things started with a major bang, staging a show that was as spectacular as it was intimate. A week ago in New York, the fashion show was declared over (a little prematurely, given Marc Jacobs’s own enlivening experience there). Michele is among our most sensitive designers. He feels the immense strain of producing these in-person events multiple times a year—he called them rituals in his postshow presser, and he absolutely intended the religious connotations—but he also understands how the internet age potentially threatens their future. Is it live, or is it Instagram?

Michele is insistent on the live experience, though he’s plenty savvy about social media too. He sent his show invitation via WhatsApp, an attention-grabbing, modern move that also happened to be a green alternative to the mountains of waste created by show production. A pair of WhatsApp’d images followed the invite; one was a snapshot of Michele doing his best #evachenpose, fingers covered in rings and nails painted an aqua blue, and the other was a close-up of a Gucci label stitched with the words Faconnier de Rêves. That’s “Dream Maker” to you and me.

In ringmaster—high priest?—mode, Michele staged a show in the round, exposing the behind-the-scenes action of the hair and makeup teams and the model dressers at work as they prepared the 60 cast members in their looks. There were shades of Unzipped (the 1995 fashion documentary) here, only in this instance the stage revolved, giving the audience full 360-degree views, and—the designer pointed out afterward—doing the same for the models and the backstage crew. “You were our show, and we were your show,” he said in his typically elliptical manner. Entry into the show space was through a backstage area too, and Michele was seen mingling in the crowd.

Inserting viewers in the action would seem a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, but Michele found himself connecting it with childhood. Last season he paid tribute to Gucci’s Tom Ford days; there were slip dresses, exposed bras, and ’70s-by-way-of-the-’90s pantsuits—the clothes that made Michele fall in love with fashion. Here, he looked further back, taking cues from “the perfection” of little girls’ clothes—pinafore dresses, school uniforms—and, it seemed, from the outfits of those little girls’ minders, nuns to nurses included.

He did something similar at his men’s outing last month; youth, for him, equates to “beauty and freedom.” For whom does it not? But today, as then, he kept the story lively. There were hippie nods, grunge allusions, and Moulin Rouge!–on-the-prairie gowns. And no, he didn’t bypass kink entirely. A patent leather harness was the accessory du jour.

As ever, the rule-breaking irreverence of his clothes was mirrored by the nontraditional beauties who wore them, but there seemed an inordinate number of overly thin models onstage this afternoon. Truer shape diversity would’ve made the communion of this Michele-orchestrated moment more powerful.

A voiceover at the start and end of the show in which the Italian director Federico Fellini celebrates the art of moviemaking illuminated Michele’s intentions today. “Fellini was talking about the sacredness of cinema and the rituals of filmgoing,” the designer explained. “We all belong to the same circus,” he continued, “and I really want to go on repeating this ritual.” Michele is a believer, and in turn, he makes believers of us too.