Before Florence Welch started writing songs, she wrote poetry. Even as a kid, she crafted odes to polar bears and hypothetical heartbreak. “I remember writing this kind of breakup song before I even had a boyfriend,” she said at the newly opened Dashwood-curated Gucci Wooster Bookstore, where she read some lyrics and poems from her new book, Useless Magic. “I was like, ‘There’s a rose on the table and it’s the last thing you gave me,’—broken picture frames, dying roses, and things like that.”
Useless Magic meditates on the subtle distinction between poetry and songwriting. “My song presence is quite defined, and I wasn’t quite sure what I would say if it wasn’t to be sung,” she explained. “The songs kind of lead to big ideas and grandeur, while poetry leads to smaller, more contained thoughts, so I was exploring that.”
Her writing has clearly developed since those early days, as last night’s cocktail hour reading made clear—Welch, who is the official fine jewelry ambassador to the Italian fashion house, read a brief selection of poems to a captivated crowd, which included writer Antwaun Sargent, painter John Currin, and playwright Jeremy O. Harris. After the reading, Gucci held an intimate dinner at The Fat Radish in celebration of Welch’s new book.
Welch not only wore a Gucci outfit, naturally, which included an embroidered blue cape and a pair of appliqué leather boots (her favorite pair, she said), but she enlisted Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, to design the book cover. “He’s kind of a total kindred spirit. Somehow I don’t know how we’re not related, like our tastes are so similar,” she said. “The thing I love about what Alessandro has done at Gucci is the details and the symbolism—you sense the romance and the story behind everything.” Much like, it turns out, Welch’s own writing.