Fashion’s biggest question has, at last, found its answer: Gucci’s new artistic director is Demna.
Balenciaga’s creative director since 2015, Demna was today announced as the new creative lead at Gucci in a statement from Kering Group, parent to both houses. “His creative power is exactly what Gucci needs,” said Kering’s chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault.
The 43-year-old Georgian-born designer will oversee his final couture show at Balenciaga on 6 July before decamping to Italy’s largest luxury house, where he will work in partnership with Gucci CEO Stefano Cantino. Demna’s successor at Balenciaga will be named in due course, Kering indicated.
“I am truly excited to join the Gucci family,” Demna said in the release: “It is an honour to contribute to a house that I deeply respect and have long admired. I look forward to writing together with Stefano and the whole team a new chapter of Gucci’s amazing story.”
Demna prefaced that new chapter when in 2021 he had his first creative interaction with Gucci. That year Demna granted Gucci’s then creative lead, Alessandro Michele, his blessing to creatively appropriate Balenciaga’s silhouettes and codes for Gucci’s “Hacker Project”: Balenciaga graphics appeared on canonical Gucci accessories such as the Jackie bag, while Michele applied his time-traveller bedazzlement to Demna’s broodingly contemporary silhouettes.
Now Demna is charged with shaping his own vision of Gucci. A decade ago at Balenciaga, he was asked to adapt and evolve the subversively streetwise and witty aesthetic dialect he first enunciated with Vetements in 2014. Contemporary estimates put Balenciaga’s revenues at approximately €200 million during his first year there (Kering does not specify its annual revenue). In 2021, HSBC estimated that figure had risen to €1.76 billion.
Demna, who in 2021 ceased using the surname Gvasalia, is without question one of the most original, innovative and influential designers of our time. Gucci, meanwhile, is Italy’s largest luxury fashion house by revenue. Despite a slump from its €10.5 billion peak in 2022, in 2024 it reported revenues of €7.65 billion, a sum more than double the €3.56 billion reported by Prada, financially its closest fellow Italian competitor.
The challenge (and adventure) facing Demna at Gucci starts with deciding how to integrate the house’s codes and spirit to shape a freshly accented manifestation of his design language. Between Vetements’s foundation and his most recent show at Balenciaga, Demna has always paid as much attention to the streets as he has to fashion’s rigmarole of celebrity and status. This democratic and socially pragmatic impulse should be to his advantage at a house built on a foundation of small leather goods, and which enjoys a far broader reach than the house he is now preparing to exit.
Gucci’s chaotically human backstory might also prove a richly dramatic seam of material. And while it has not been communicated to what extent Demna will be based at Gucci’s recently established and expanded Milan studios, it seems likely that he will look to bring a freshly global outlook as only the second non-Italian to lead design at the brand since the days of Tom Ford’s transformational part in its story.
How Demna came to Gucci
Prior to today’s announcement, Kering’s deputy CEO in charge of brand development, Francesca Bellettini, hosted a briefing meeting alongside Cantino to share the story behind Demna’s appointment. While the meeting was declared off the record, they retrospectively consented to the below to be included in this report.
Cantino revealed that Demna was first approached several months ago. Bellettini added: “We went out for dinner. I said: ‘we would really love to talk about this opportunity’. And after a second of thinking he was very excited, and said: ‘Yes! I have it in my mind — let me put together the project for you. He worked on that, and when Stefano and I received it for the first time, we were both: ‘Let’s accelerate!.’”
Although still formally engaged by Balenciaga, Demna has already travelled with Cantino to Florence to commence his immersion within Gucci’s immaculately kept archive. During the trip, “I kept getting incredible messages from both of them,” said Bellettini. She added of Gucci: “It’s a company which, whenever you light up that spark of creativity and of artistic vision, performs.”
The power of Demna’s creative spark is not open to debate. Yet there is one potential pitfall when a designer whose aesthetic is so widely known and strongly defined moves from one house to another. This is that, unless redefined and adapted to its new milieu, the relocated design sensibility seems like a decontextualised repetition. Bellettini said: “To your point, after 10 years, he’s ready to change and to have a new creative challenge. He’s really eclectic in his creativity.”
Creating the context for that creativity at Gucci has been, the executives said, their recent priority. Following Michele’s departure in 2022, the brand has been engaged on a structural renovation designed to futureproof it. This, they intend, will equip Gucci to sustain growth under Demna’s forthcoming artistic direction. Cantino said that the renovation was focused on brand elevation, quality and communication, while Bellettini added that the scale and speed of supply, as well as the structure and staffing of teams had also been subject to root-and-branch reform. She added: “We went after a growth that was so fast. As a CEO you need to control growth: you cannot just let it explode in your hands without fixing the machine that is behind it. So we wanted to refocus the company on that machine; on the quality of the product and on the time of delivery.”
Discussing the contribution of Sabato De Sarno, the successor to Michele who exited the brand this year, Bellettini said: “Immense. If we were able to do this over these two years, it was because we had Sabato. We had to work on the fundamentals, he was the designer to work on them, and I can only say good things about him.”
Ups and downs
There is another factor that makes Demna and Gucci compatible: thanks to the shared symmetry of ups and downs in their recent fortunes, they are both in some respects already in a similar place.
In December 2015, Demna was handed creative control of Balenciaga, shortly after Gucci appointed Alessandro Michele to the equivalent position that same year. Both houses enjoyed unprecedented levels of critical acclaim and financial growth under the two men until, in 2022, both Gucci and Demna hit significant bumps in their respective roads.
At Gucci, revenue growth had slowed (in retrospect, a luxury problem). It is understood that Michele disagreed with the house’s then-management team’s insistence upon a shift in his creative direction: he departed in November of that year. After some time to regroup, Kering and Gucci then began the process of rebuilding that led to today’s news. As Bellettini put it: “Gucci has two souls: it has the heritage and it needs to have the fashionability… However, it is not enough to inject creativity if the product does not stand for the positioning of Gucci.”
That same month, Balenciaga became embroiled in a controversy that compromised Demna’s previously unimpeachable record not only as a designer for his times, but also a champion of just political and environmental causes. Two ill-considered Balenciaga campaigns contained a series of negatively ambiguous and unwittingly disturbing, even sinister, details. The multiple acts of creative carelessness and lack of oversight that enabled these campaigns to be signed off were widely — and wildly — conflated, then decried as the conscious product of Demna’s design.
After some poorly executed crisis management, the house and its designer apologised, however, the damage was done: Demna’s previously unchecked upward arc took a reputational hit. While he has emerged from the controversy, and since presented some of his best Balenciaga shows and collections, it was a painful episode.
Wrong gossip, right result
Ever since Sabato De Sarno’s exit on 6 February (and in some unseemly cases even before), there has been widespread speculation and rumour-mongering about the identity of his successor. Many names were mooted, and even published, during a orgy of often wildly wrong and borderline toxic gossip that has convulsed fashion during a period of wider industry change.
At the briefing, Bellettini and Cantino smiled when asked about the rumours regarding Gucci — to which a succession of names, most consistently that of Hedi Slimane, have been both confidently and completely incorrectly applied.
“To be honest, [it has been] very useful!” said Bellettini. Diplomatically, she and Cantino implied that the variety of the (wrongly) linked designer names were an educational form of market research. And doubtless the scrutiny focused elsewhere also afforded them and Demna space to marinate their plans for Gucci’s future. She added her belief that the announcement of Demna’s renewed contract at Balenciaga last November — which in truth was drafted to last just long enough to take him to his end-date following July’s couture show — had put even fashion’s most rabid tattlers off the scent.
Four days ago, speaking after his last-ever Balenciaga ready-to-wear show, Demna was quoted as saying: “Fashion has become this giant rumour mill, which is fun, because people like a guessing game. But I think in that fog of rumpus, what is important? Sometimes I read more about rumours than what we really want from fashion now. Does it make any sense? I’m staying with fashion forever.”
Demna’s declaration of fidelity to fashion can now be applied to Gucci. In retrospect, some of the “standard” Balenciaga collection presented on Sunday can be read as a coded gesture of farewell to the house. Touching on his Balenciaga archetypes spanning the banal to the bizarre, the clothes were shown in a claustrophobic corporate maze. Today’s revelation of his Gucci elevation suddenly brings him far closer to the center of fashion’s labyrinth.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Demna concluded: “Maybe what I want to do now is just make great clothes for my customer, for someone who likes what I do and relates to that aesthetic, and who understands clothes through wearing them, not speculating about them.”
This story was first published on Vogue Business.
