The inside of Milan’s sprawling convention center was so completely transformed into a Gucci store, down to the low-slung velvet seats, that at least one guest near me was convinced it was the real thing: a new flagship. In fact, it was a simulacrum, but one purpose built to represent Demna’s new concept for the mega-brand’s future retail spaces.
We got our first glimpse of Demna’s Gucci a year ago when he launched La Famiglia via a lookbook and a short movie starring Demi Moore. By his own admission today, he’s wrestled with the task of figuring out precisely what he wants to say here and balancing that with what the job itself demands. In the process, he cycled through La Famiglia, or as he thinks of it, “the Gucci before fashion;” the 1990s moment he grew up on; the “tunnel vision project of getting closer to the body and doing sexy” that was his divisive February show; and the GucciCore he presented in Times Square in May. “It took me a year to get to this collection and to really understand what Gucci is for me because Gucci is so many things,” he acknowledged backstage.
“Personally, I’m in need of a silhouette,” he told Vogue earlier this year, “and in September I will dare myself to show it.” That’s not exactly what we got. This Gucci show contained multitudes: among them the horsey equestrian in riding jacket and boots, the bourgeois Milanese in a crisp trench, and the glamour queen in a slinky evening number that winked at Tom Ford’s ’90s jersey dresses.
For me, the most persuasive part of the show was the twisted preps. Demna’s boarding schoolers gone bad wore bomber jackets, popped collar rugbies, and tartan kilts punctuated by giant horsebits, or hip-slung jeans suspended from multi-buckle belts, their necks stacked with chains. There was something vicious about them that recalled his Balenciaga years. The peaked shoulder tailoring, nipped and snug where his former self would’ve gone oversize, also felt true to his instincts.
Demna said the look he was proudest of was the final evening dress, a feat of engineering which draped over one shoulder and stayed in place thanks to a teardrop-shaped metal weight. It was a stunner. Still, maybe the most impressive part of the show was the menswear with its late ’80s/early ’90s Homer Gere in The Shards vibes (the young actor was sitting in the front row). Demna said, “I went again back to Dawn Mello [who reinvigorated Gucci in that time period] and the family and what Gucci stood for… I was kind of afraid of it because it’s really outside of my comfort zone. My background is as far as it can be from that, and I think I was petrified of guys with cropped pants, no socks, and loafers.” Design what you know may be the rule, but Demna does a very persuasive aristo hunk. Today he showed his own growth potential, and Gucci’s.
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