On a bright, crisp February morning in Milan, a day before a make-or-break show, Demna, once the leading iconoclast of French fashion and now the artistic director of Gucci, tours his offices with a curious air of calm.
“Obviously, I’m a bit stressed but I feel good,” he says, raking his eyes around a studio trimmed in a style unmistakably his own. A pair of leather sofas rest near full-length windows. Patchwork curtains by the artist Pia Camil trace the wall. When, a decade ago, Gucci moved into this sleek array of buildings on the industrial Via Mecenate, the brand managed to reassert its reputation as something like the Italian sports car of fashion—a streamlined, leather-bound vehicle with a brisk, outlandish kick—an image that has since become ensconced in popular culture. “My cousin, who is 16 and spends her life on Roblox, heard that I was going to Gucci and was like, ‘Do you know Gucci is a word we use a lot to describe a certain state of mind? If you feel Gucci, it means you want to be crazy and meet people and be out there,’ Demna says. He smiles and adds: “I want to make people feel Gucci tomorrow.”
Demna Gvasalia, as he was born in Georgia (he doffed his surname at the peak of his ascent at Balenciaga, five years ago), is now 45, an age when designers often arrive at the mature version of themselves. Yet his voice seemed fully formed a fashion eon ago, in 2014, the year he co-founded Vetements, and mere months before he was named Balenciaga’s artistic director, further widening his reach. “It made him the most influential designer of the decade,” Alexandre Samson, the fashion historian and a curator at Palais Galliera, in Paris, says. “He created characters that were very clear and reflective of an Eastern, post-USSR youth culture with no money, which looked to, admired, and despised the Western world.” Demna saw that this ambivalence, covetous and critical, could speak to the social-media-ruled capitals of the West too. “It was a very strong take, mixing logo mania with deconstructive patternmaking skills and sportswear,” Samson says. It was intensely personal, too, and has remained so through years of reimagining since then.
In the studio, Demna wears loose black Adidas trousers, a black T-shirt bearing the logo of the heavy metal band Slipknot, and black Gucci mules—an example of the flowing baggy silhouette that he defined. When he was young, in bourgeois Europe, his personal style was often taken as provocation. He was chased from restaurants and had foodstuffs thrown at him. Since then, it has become a key template for mainstream luxury taste.
When Demna took the helm of Gucci last summer, after a decade leading Balenciaga, the move was received much in the spirit of Long John Silver winning control of the Hispaniola. The brand had spent a couple of years adrift; his arrival promised to make it rollick on the waves again. “He designs what he wants, Kim Kardashian, a longtime friend and muse of Demna’s, says: “He’s just so unapologetically himself.”
What was less certain was whether Demna’s style of attention could suit so large and mainstream a brand. Gucci is the crown jewel of Kering, the luxury conglomerate, and, in a year of industry downturns, it has become a charged bellwether too. (The company’s fate is so twined with Gucci’s success that the brand’s CEO tells me she weaned herself off checking hour-by-hour global sales figures in bed.) “The teams have a big responsibility because they are handling a mega brand,” Luca de Meo, Kering’s CEO, says. “Handle with care!” Demna, who trained in the Antwerp school of conceptualism, was known as an arch, biting ironist with a taste for provocation. (An early Vetements collection included what looked like yellow dishwashing gloves.) There was a risk of this restless style straining under Gucci-scale success. At least that was the anxiety. In the studio, Demna surprises me by saying that, since arriving, he has sloughed off his conceptualism for a more immediate, sensual approach.
“Gucci is a very pragmatic brand and it’s about product. It’s liberating not to have to conceptualise a dress just to make a dress that you love,” he says. “This is how fashion should be: more intuitive and emotional. Either ‘I hate it’ or ‘I love it’.” For his first Gucci showing, he presented a capsule collection (La Famiglia) in the form of a film, exploring what he describes as the brand’s essential characters based on its looks of the 1970s. His pre-autumn collection was a tribute to the sexy, soigné looks that defined the house in the ’90s, under Tom Ford. On this particular day, the collection he’s about to show is an account of Gucci in the present: his own vision, joining him to a generation of Belgian conceptualists, including Matthieu Blazy and Pieter Mulier, that discovered a new sensuality at large heritage brands. (So far, the moves have registered. While it is by most measures too early to ice major sales effects, store traffic rose from the release of the first capsule collection.) From a rack hung with a few pieces that will appear on the runway the next day, Demna extracts coats that look like fur but are actually the more ubiquitous agricultural by-product, shearling, trimmed on a bias and stitched with muslin for an effect as light as a windbreaker in the hand.
Lightness is everything, Demna now thinks—lightness and speed. On arriving at Gucci, he discovered that all the studio’s prototypes were sewn off-site. One of the first changes he made was to create a Gucci atelier on-site, so that garments could be made more quickly—more industrially—and edited not on paper but in the round, with pins and scissors.
Demna takes up a couple of classic handbags that he also made lighter and more supple, and he shows off two exquisite dresses on mannequins: one purple, with a classic Gucci pattern; the other in shimmering gold sequins. Beyond these displays, his studio is curiously empty, as if it, too, has been subjected to a lightness regime. Demna seems suddenly aware of the absence.
“I don’t want to show you too many things,” he says with a playful smile. “I want the show to be a surprise.”
Many people trace Demna’s touch—if not his sensibility—to four spirited years he spent working at Maison Martin Margiela early in his career, overseeing the women’s ready-to-wear collections. “He absolutely understood the process and the way of thinking behind the whole brand: the idea of repurposing”—Margiela, like Demna, was known for using vintage pieces as a starting point—”and the idea, also, of playing with society,” Samson says. At Vetements, Demna applied these processes to his own style. There were hoodies with raised or pointed shoulders, oversized jackets. As a self-conscious young man, he had taken to wearing oversized clothes as a form of self-concealment; now, he began reshaping the normative body into new and unusual forms, to thrilling effects. “At the time, there was really nothing else happening in Paris,” Julien Charrier, who started work as an intern at Vetements in 2016 and is now Demna’s chief of staff, tells me. “He was bringing something that was completely out of the box, very fresh, very young, very street-culture.” Within a year, the label was being worn—or imitated by—Jared Leto and Ye, then known as Kanye West. “He was always just so cool,” says Kardashian, who met Demna shortly after Vetements launched, before there was a storefront, and spent hours simply trying on pieces at a holding warehouse in Paris in the middle of the night.
In 2016, Demna gave his first show at Balenciaga. (He continued designing for both labels for years.) He had hits like the chunky Triple S sneaker and the wide-collar Swing shirt, but he also reached for geopolitical themes. In March 2022, after the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, his show featured models trudging through a snowstorm in yellow and blue. Within three years, the house had doubled in size and had crossed a billion dollars in sales. The Washington Post, in 2019, celebrated Demna for “changing what we consider fashion”.
When I met Demna for the first time, late that year, he was living in the woods, in Switzerland. Paris had become too distracting, he told me, too claustrophobic, too much. In Switzerland he saw almost no one, but every day before work, donning high boots and an overcoat, he went tramping into nature like a figure out of Caspar David Friedrich. He was planning to relaunch Balenciaga’s long-dormant couture operations. He had begun to think about the body in new and poetic ways. “I’m no longer on the dark side of the world,” he told me at the time.
It couldn’t last. A few months later, the whole world went dark for the COVID-19 pandemic. The remote woods of Switzerland proved an oddly perfect place to endure the lockdown, but Demna’s couture debut got pushed back a year. Meanwhile, the brand’s apparent provocations seemed to compound. In 2022, Balenciaga severed its ties with Ye, who had been one of its most prominent and stalwart public supporters, after Ye made what was widely taken to be antisemitic posts on social media. (In January this year, Ye apologised in a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal.)
“Provocation is like humour and humour cannot be stupid,” he tells me now, when I ask whether the experience compelled him to reassess the role of provocation in his life and work. “It involves a kind of nuance. Provocation is stupid when you’re the only person laughing.”
Demna had resolved to exit the Swiss woods. “After a while, I got so bored there,” he tells me. “Boredom is such a scary and tricky thing for a creative person—I always want to discover new things.” He moved to Geneva but eventually found himself back in Paris, stimulated but restless as ever. “I love Paris, but it only works as a long-distance relationship for me,” Demna tells me. “I lived there for 15 years, which is the longest I’ve been in one place in my life. But I didn’t like what fashion started to become while I was living in Paris full-time: safe, boring, beige, wannabe bourgeois, flat, superficial—all the things fashion shouldn’t be.” With the thought that a part-time life in Paris was the best kind of Paris life, he continued looking for a second perch.
He landed in Los Angeles, a place where he had always dreamed of living. He bought a 1950s bungalow and started moving in the local mix. To this day, Demna told me, he has a much more active social life in California than in Europe.
“It’s radically different, culturally speaking,” he tells me. “Modernity is there. It’s not for no reason that Silicon Valley happened in California. There’s something about feeling more free in your head about how we do stuff, how we dress, how we express ourselves. In Europe it’s much more conservative.” On taking the job at Gucci, he moved from Paris to Milan (“Also Europe, but a very different mentality, and so industrial in terms of fashion—I love it”) but kept Los Angeles as his second base. “People always say, ‘Oh, I get why you’re there—you want to be far from fashion’,’’ he says. “I’m like, ‘Actually, no—there I’m really in the epicentre of thinking behind how we use fashion.’ Whereas in Italy, what I have is the product, the heritage, the history, the manufacturing—all those things that don’t exist in LA.”
“It’s a pretty good balance,” he adds. “Gucci needs both.”
Backstage at his first show, Demna squeezes up and down the model line-up, which curls along a hallway thick with hairdressers and security personnel. “The feeling when someone falls in love with someone? I have it now,” he tells me. “I’m also worried about one million things—the shoes, the sweat—but we can’t control these things, so worrying is useless, apparently.” He grins. “I read that somewhere.”
The show will be held in the Palazzo delle Scintille, a large hall in Milan that Demna refashioned as a venue for Gucci. He had been inspired by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the house’s historical and spiritual home, and, with the Uffizi’s permission, had some classical statues there replicated. They line the periphery of the inner hall, which descends via coliseum-like steps to a long central corridor that will serve as the runway. “We built a museum for the show, basically,” Demna says. “My idea was to put Gucci back into the spotlight of the Italian Renaissance.” There were, of course, other objectives too. As guests take their seats, someone whispers: “There are so many supermodels here.”
True enough. The cast includes Kate Moss, Karlie Kloss, and Gabbriette, but also figures unaccustomed to the runway, such as the rappers Fakemink and Nettspend. (“I invited, in the cast, people that I always wanted to meet,” Demna explains to me.)
“I think the idea of splitting fashion by gender is very old—I think there’s a systemic glitch in this.”
As the house lights go down, a bright shaft appears down the runway. The model Charlie Jones steps into it, wearing a high-collar sleeveless white dress and carrying a classic black Gucci bag. The dress is tight and revealing enough to display a tattoo on the upper thigh. (‘It’s the most body-conscious I’ve ever been,” Demna says. “I’ve had a really good therapist for 10 years and, finally, I’ve started to like myself.”) Jones cross-steps briskly, followed by a gym-built man in white pants and a similar shirt. The show, like all of Demna’s at Gucci, mixes men’s and women’s looks. “I think the idea of splitting fashion by gender is very old—I think there’s a systemic glitch in this,” he says. When the muscleman walks past, somebody cries: “Wow.”
Uncharacteristically for Demna, who at Balenciaga was known for his raucous, intensifying presentations, the show blooms into poetic sequinned dresses and male models who walk barefoot. “It’s very romantic, very like Botticelli, almost like they came off the painting in a way,” he explains. “It’s a different type of beauty than I’ve ever touched on—more classic beauty, but pushed, exaggerated.” When Moss appears to end the show, in a black backless sequinned dress, a cheer breaks out. An old vision is made new again.
In 1993, Demna’s family fled their hometown of Sukhumi, Georgia, under threat of ethnic cleansing, and settled in Tbilisi. One of his first jobs, at 17, was translating Reuters copy for Georgian TV, and, since then, he has rarely succeeded in outrunning the news. (On 11 September 2001, as horrific reports streamed in New York, it was the young Demna who did the simultaneous translation for the Georgian audience.) Nor has he long settled in one place.
That restlessness, paradoxically, has helped root him in his new professional home. Guccio Gucci, the brand’s founder and son of a straw-hat maker, opened a shop in Florence’s Via della Vigna Nuova in 1921; by the late ’30s, he was making handbags. From the outset, Gucci signalled its self-invention: its crest featured not a soldier, as aristocratic crests did, but a figure carrying two suitcases. Guccio’s son Aldo helped push the company into belts, shoes and gloves, and excelled at industrial improvisation. During wartime shortages, the house produced handbags with bamboo handles. By 1960, Gucci had opened in New York, soon followed by London, Paris and Los Angeles. It moved into ready-to-wear and became synonymous with jet-set glamour. In 1974, Elton John, writing of his transatlantic travels in British Vogue, could refer to passengers on the SS France as ‘Gucci-Pucci’ and be understood.
Two decades of intrigue, betrayal and assassination followed. A series of struggles between members of the Gucci family formed the basis of the 2021 movie House of Gucci, culminating in the murder of Maurizio Gucci and the overtaking of the brand by what subsequently became Kering. Tom Ford, then unknown, was named creative director in 1994 and within a year was credited with creating the brand’s first extraordinary renaissance, moving away from bourgeois-brown fashion for a sexy, shocking new hue. A second renaissance came in 2015, with the winsomely androgynous flair of Alessandro Michele.
With Michele’s departure, in 2022, the house fell back into disorder. Revenue tumbled 21 percent in 2024; in just the first half of the following year, it fell 25 percent further. Sabato De Sarno, the creative director, parted ways with the brand in 2025, and Gucci had three CEOs over two years. Last autumn, Kering appointed one of its most powerful leaders, Francesca Bellettini, as Gucci’s president and CEO. Her mandate, she tells me one afternoon over coffee in the Milan Four Seasons, was immediately clear. “I know that a lot of people say Gucci is like the phoenix, going up and down and re-emerging from the ashes,” she says. “No.” She shakes her head. “We need to go up with normal growth—and stay up.”
Demna was Bellettini’s first big notion. “I knew him from Balenciaga, which he had already decided to leave,” she says. She saw a fit and put the prospect to him over dinner. “He was like, ‘I can do it,’” she recalls. Just one thing: he wanted to study first.
“I didn’t know so much about Gucci—I knew the movie, you know?” Demna tells me. “I knew Alessandro, and I knew Tom Ford from fashion TV when I was, like, 13, but to understand the brand, I had to know what Gucci stood for outside of those three things.” Over the weeks that followed, he made visits to the Gucci archive, in Florence, with espionage-like cover. “I saw the whole world,” he says. “Homeware. Chairs. Umbrellas. A roulette wheel. And on top of that, the most incredible collections.” He shrugs. “I was seduced.”
Demna proposed to Bellettini that he compile a presentation in which to assemble his thoughts. “I need to convince you and myself that we can do this,” she recalls him saying. “That’s what my vision of Gucci is—creating this FOMO,” Demna says. “The chic, the elegance, the Italian-ness of it. The dolce vita, but in a nonchalant way. There’s a bit of humour to it, but it’s not sarcastic. It’s a fun thing, quite punk, in away. Like, ‘I like myself, and I don’t care what other people think.’ There’s something daring about it—it’s flamboyant. It’s confident. You know who you are.”
The Los Angeles fires started that night. Demna left with nothing but his passport and his laptop. He had not backed up his presentation. “I sent it to Kering and I was like: this is my vision. And if they don’t like it, I might as well know that now.”
But Bellettini understood what he put forward: a freedom possible only in a house whose history was rich in product. “What he was explaining as a liberation was the fact that the brand doesn’t come from a couture maison,” she recalls. “There isn’t a Cristóbal Balenciaga, an Yves Saint Laurent, a Christian Dior, to whom you’re always going to be compared.” When Demna presented his plan to François-Henri Pinault, the chairman of Kering, he was pelted with questions. “François-Henri wanted to be sure,” Bellettini says. “And Demna was so precise in his answers that he was like, ‘Okay, done.”
In general, Demna’s creative day starts slowly—a self-protective nest of discipline which he says he learnt from Marc Jacobs, for whom he worked at Louis Vuitton more than a decade ago. In Milan, he takes the morning for himself. He has coffee and a smoothie. He meditates. He cuddles his two chihuahuas and takes them walking.
At noon, he reports for work at the office, from which point he is usually scheduled straight through to 8pm. He rarely takes more than a 15-minute break. “It’s intense, but I love it because when I’m in the flow of working, I’m quite fast in making decisions,” he says. “We manage a lot for a brand this size in one day.”
We are drinking ginger-lemon kombucha at a banquette table in The Campbell Bar in New York’s Grand Central Station. Demna is in the middle of a two-week stay in New York; after preparing two looks for the Met Gala, he is now preparing for his larger errand in town. In a few days’ time, Gucci will show its cruise collection in the centre of Times Square, and Demna has been roaming the city for research and inspiration.
“I’ll go to vintage stores, bookstores. See some art, get some cultural impact,” he says. The process is about both gathering images as references for his collections and buying vintage pieces to use as physical canvases, ‘raw material’ that he can cut and pin. “It’s very hard sometimes to start making a jacket from scratch, especially when it comes to tailoring and shapes,” he explains. “I need to have material that has good details and good proportions that I can cut and Frankenstein into the shapes I want to get to.”
Shape has been extensively on Demna’s mind as he works on his September collection. After taking his deliberate process of understanding Gucci stage by stage—starting with the fundamentals of La Famiglia and progressing to the sexy Fordian club style of his first Milan show—he feels that he is ready to present a Gucci that draws on the history of the house but is his. In fashion terms, this means coming out with new silhouettes: particular configurations of form, proportion and mood, which, like the boxy Chanel jacket or the Dior hourglass of a dress, will be recognisable as the signature of his vision for the brand.
“Personally, I’m in need of a defined Gucci silhouette, and in September I will dare myself to show it,” he says, and signals for a second kombucha. “It’s about centimetres, it really is,” he says. “It’s about proportion. And I want to do something that also I haven’t done before, which”—he smiles—”limits the possibilities.”
“Personally, I’m in need of a defined Gucci silhouette, and in September I will dare myself to show it.”
He started with the mood. “What is the feeling I want to give so a person can be like, ‘I feel Gucci’?”
Sharp, Confident, Chic, Bold, Rich, Eccentric, Hot, Sexy, Cool.
“Sharp as in not wobbly, not round. There is no cocoon shape at Gucci,” he explains. “Sexy and hot: they’re not the same. You can be completely covered and feel hot, but you can’t be sexy. For sexy, you need to show some body. Gucci needs to have both.”
One by one, he worked through his words, using them to define what the silhouette was and wasn’t. In the spring, he went to one of his favourite vintage men’s tailoring shops, in Rome. “It has the most meticulous selection of jackets and coats in Italian men’s tailoring—I half-emptied the store,” he says. “We’re using those pieces when I work the silhouette, in defining the shoulder line and the sleeve shape.”
A few days later, I meet Demna in the 23rd Street studio where he is holding fittings for the New York show. The show’s fashion concept expresses his mercantile turn. “I call it GucciCore,” he tells me. “Like hardcore, but also the essence, the base, of the aesthetic”. In other words, ‘staples’ that customers can reliably find in a Gucci shop.
“For example, this is a very important piece for me,” he says, pulling from the rack a red women’s double-breasted jacket, his version of the classic peacoat. “I was afraid to work on it, because I don’t like peacoats. How could I make one that I really liked?” The answer to the question became a kind of key. If he could make a Gucci peacoat that he loved (“It’s the fit, the proportions of the collar, the size and positioning of the buttons, the length”), then he could extend his point of view across worlds of merchandise.
The other key—and perhaps his greatest, if quietest, innovation at Gucci to date—concerned sizing. Traditionally, fashion is tailored to tall runway models and then graded up or down into standard sizes, often losing the proportional relationships crucial to a fit. “It doesn’t consider the body type,” Demna says. “If someone is shorter and more muscled, he’s going to look like a dork.” At Gucci, he is developing a wholly new sizing system so that the integrity of a look will hold whether you’re tall and lean or short and thick. In the meantime, many cruise collection pieces exist in three different fits: a small, a medium and what might be called a Demna fit—the baggy proportions that he himself would buy.
During fittings, Demna perches at a table at one end of the studio. An assistant brings him an energy bar and a bowl of nuts. A tall male model appears in a jacket, sunglasses and flowing black pants.
“I’m not sure about this one,” Demna says. He takes off the sunglasses, then walks over to a rack of pieces, assessing alternatives, and eventually emerges on a long coat. The problem with the jacket, he explains, was that it looked somehow implausible. “That’s my big thing—to find the authenticity.”
The night of the show is clear and cool: a New York City spring caught in the hourglass of Times Square. Smoke is piped in from the street corners, giving the Midtown canyons an eerie feel. By 8.10pm, guests have begun to arrive on Gucci’s walled-off grey carpet. “Being at Gucci, he can dream as big as he wants, right?” Kardashian tells me. “He can say ‘I want a show in Times Square’ and pull it off.
Demna is in a sushi restaurant on 47th Street that has been commandeered as the show’s backstage. In one hand, he holds a Starbucks cup; in the other, a big red apple, as if in a nod to the city. The floor is marked with line-up tape for the models, and large screens near the entrance track street footage from cameras and drones. Demna draws close and peers at the footage in wonder for a moment and then heads out into the cool air of the square. Imaginary Gucci advertisements are playing across nearly 50 billboard-sized screens and more than two dozen more at sidewalk level. Every celebrity arrival—from Mariah Carey in a crisp white Gucci coat to Lindsay Lohan in a black leather ensemble, Playboi Carti in shiny python trousers to EsDeeKid in a shimmering black jacket and baggy silver jeans and his signature balaclava—garners cheers from onlookers gathered on sidewalks and street corners. At a few minutes past nine, the screens all dim. Charlie Jones, again in the first look—this time bearing an apple in a deceptively simple black suit—traces a path through the crowd.
In the wee hours of the previous night, when Times Square was as quiet and as empty as it would ever be, the Gucci crew had assembled for their only rehearsal. Everybody wore earphones so as not to project the music through the square. Now, with full sound and all 50 big screens tracing the runway movement with nervy panoptic attention, the effect is haunting. Suits of various power hues come down the runway. The red peacoat appears paired with black pants. There are bikers in leather, Venuses in shearling. Tom Brady swaggers in an asymmetric black jacket and matching trousers in leather. (For all the show’s diversity in age and aspect, it continues to centre on slender or gym-built bodies.) When Paris Hilton appears with a black fur-like coat slung over the shoulder of a sunflower yellow Gucci-patterned summer dress with a high lavallière neck—hot, not sexy—every phone in the audience seems to lift up.
For much of his career, Demna was known for shows that built towards an unsettled climax, but the effect here is the opposite. The sequence culminates as Cindy Crawford, at 60, dressed in a high shoulder-less dress of long black feathers, takes the final walk, as slowly and as grandly as la passeggiata. For a long, dilated moment, Times Square is silent, as if holding its breath.
Later that night, the party reconvenes at the Gucci Mansion, a property with a courtyard on Madison Avenue reimagined as a centre of the Gucci life across time. A jazz singer and quartet on the first floor scat-sings ‘It’s De-Lovely’. The basement is a billiards lounge in red: red carpet, red curtains, red walls. A fortune teller in a hideaway reads the future by lamplight.
Demna arrives after midnight and settles into the courtyard with guests taking the night air. He is surrounded by well-wishers and in an expansive mood. “I’m relieved that this is done because it was very complex,” he says, still clutching his Starbucks cup—as if the evening, carried by its Gucci momentum, has borne him ceaselessly along. “But a lot of people told me that it was 12 minutes of forgetting about whatever they were thinking before.” He smiles. “I love that.”
Portraits Rineke Dijkstra
Photography Alessio Bolzoni
Fashion editor Luca Galasso
Hair Esther Langham
Makeup Aaron de Mey
Manicure Raphaël Park Charles
Fashion photographs, Production Starkman & Associates
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