Michele wears his infantilism on his puffy sleeve (and front, back, and any other place where he can stick a glittery snake or a rose or any other number of banalities). His clothes are not beautiful – true beauty requires a certain degree of sweep – but cute, pretty. Its surface is sickly sweet, like coffee with too much sugar in it. It hides lack of design in the overload of ornamentation. It’s supposed to be “fun,” the way I assume Disney Land or Las Vegas must be fun for the hordes of people who go in for such things.

Besides the fashion victims, Gucci taps well into the prevailing mode of the fashion cognoscenti, who consume fashion with campy irony (the fact that it appeals to both the casual consumers and the insiders is some new level of meta-irony). Much of Michele’s output is calculatedly inelegant, which plays very well with the in-club, whose prevailing modus operandi is “it’s cool because we say so,” since they don’t need to back up their opinion in the postmodern world that has demolished all markers of merit when it comes to taste, thereby rendering any argument about taste meaningless. You can look no further than Michele himself, who came out to take the final bow at the end of last show in Seinfeld-jeans and a reissue of a retro Gucci tee (retro is integral to camp). When Obama wore such stylish denim he was roundly ridiculed for wearing “Mom jeans,” but no one would dare say that of Michele, the fashion insider par excellence, for fear of seeming to not “get it.”

What’s left when you cannot talk about the clothes in any meaningful way is shopping. And the amount of product Gucci puts out under Michele is staggering. The last Gucci show – granted it combined men’s and women’s – featured one hundred and twenty over-styled looks. The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to styling is another trick in obfuscating Michele’s lack of ideas. The pressure to put out product must be enormous – according to Marco Bizzarri, the new Gucci CEO, Kering has invested “billions – not millions – of euros” into overhauling the company’s image, including redecorating its 500 stores. Bizzarri, a former executive at Accenture, a management consulting firm, also let it be known in his recent interview with the Financial Times that he ensures that product sales data flows from stores straight to his and Michele’s desk, which means that product dictates design, and not the other way around. The pricing on this stuff reflects no discernible rhyme or reason. Last week I checked the Gucci rack at Bergdorf Goodman – a disheveled looking cotton hoodie with a retro Gucci logo retailed for $1,290. The profit margin on a piece like that must be staggering.