MILAN — Demna’s first show for Gucci opened with a little white dress, a seamless silk tube woven like a stocking. He thought of it as a blank slate, a statement about body-consciousness from which followed every other second-skin piece of clothing that made its way down the runway. It was a celebration of the body which came from a designer who has finally learned to love his own after a lifetime of despising the way he looked. It was also an experiment, one that has confounded, even inflamed, an audience who were maybe expecting an answer to the question posed by The New York Times on the eve of the debut: Can Demna Save Gucci?
“I hope it is polarising,” the designer said during a conversation the day before the show, “because it is important to include that in my vision of Gucci. I like this idealised version of it. It’s not about body diversity and stuff like that. I’ve been through that already. It is important, but this is different. This is about healthy. This is about sexy. This is about being impressed by someone, or being turned on by someone.”
We were talking about the changes in his life and Demna’s embrace of his own physicality was clearly the one that had the most bearing on his outlook. He exercises a lot, he eats — he claimed — like a Real Housewife and he feels better at 45 than he did a decade ago. “My relationship to my body defined my aesthetic in the past 10 years, and even before I did fashion, because I was already dressing like that. I pulled my sleeves down when I was a 16-year-old because I was ashamed of my hairy arms. I hated myself, literally despised myself. And it affected not only my aesthetic but my mental health. I was drinking too much. I never throw anything away, so I can see all the drunk decisions I was making during meetings.”
“I’m in the process of falling in love,” he said. “I thought maybe it was Gucci, but I think it’s more about me falling in love with myself. I feel like it’s so amazing, because then you discover that you don’t need to be a victim to be good. It’s liberating. You know how a lot of artistic people say I can’t be creative if I’m not in a shit hole, if I’m not betrayed or abandoned. I understand very well because I went through this period in my life where I was convinced I needed to be a piece of shit so I could do good work. Sometimes it may take all your life to get over things. But it was good timing for me to come to Gucci. I think a year ago, it would have been different. I wouldn’t do the collection I’m showing.”
You notice the not-so-little things. Once when I wrote about Demna, I mentioned those hairy arms of his and I heard back he wasn’t happy. But now his arms and their byzantine tattoos were on full display in his Slipknot t-shirt (he owns 45 of them). He’s not embarrassed anymore. “It’s so stupid but when you’re in an industry where I see perfect bodies, perfect faces, perfect everything, it’s hard. I don’t know how it is for my colleagues, but for me, with my issues about myself, it’s been very difficult. Now I look at these guys or girls and I’m ok with how I am. I’m not jealous.”
He was definitely more at ease talking about subjects like beauty and sex appeal than he’s ever been. “My idea of sex appeal at Balenciaga was very different. Now I want to feel good about myself. I want to seduce. I want to be seduced. I want to be tempted. I want to desire. I want to like myself.” These could be lines from Ryan Murphy’s new series “The Beauty,” where a virus spread STD-style transmogrifies the ugly, the sick and the lame into raving beauties, the major drawback being that, two years later, it also turns them raving mad. Demna’s watching it. “It’s this almost primal human thing about sex, how it’s all beauty and how suddenly they all get laid and then it kills them in two years. But they have those two years.”
The Gucci show felt like Demna’s own meditation on the equation of beauty, sex and lethality: The voracious women with their lacquered lips, leggings and croptops; the hulking himbos; the sparkling barefooted innocents. The massive museum-like space in which we were seated was lined with replicas of classical statuary, the beauty ideals of another millennium gazing implacably down on Demna’s. When he first saw a picture of the model who wore the opening look, he couldn’t understand it. “Her face was so symmetric that it almost looked like AI. I wanted to enhance that. I wanted to exaggerate that kind of classic idea of beauty proportions, the lips and nose, not what people know. When I met Piergiorgio, my casting director, for the first time, he said, ‘I understand you like a different kind of beauty’. I told him to chill out with that. I wanted to explore something I never really touched on, this very standard beauty, and exaggerate the idea of that. I’ve never had so much makeup and glam in a show. I’m so fed up with this beige, hydrated, TikTok world of clean beauty. I just can’t see that anymore. I want real beauty. How can we use it to enhance and make it almost unhuman somehow? So I went on exaggerating the features of every person with makeup, but, like, really hardcore, both men and women. I think it’s very Gucci. It’s very Italian. Somehow, it’s very Gina Lollobrigida but in today’s context. It’s in no way retro. I didn’t want it to be drag or too costume-y or too theatrical.”
The first men Demna showed were exaggerations as well. “Guys who are obsessed with working out,” he clarified. “But what happens with this kind of body? I mean, they’re gorgeous, but it’s still problematic, because they have big thighs and calves, and small waists.” Ordinary sizing doesn’t adjust for changes in proportion because it’s based on one fitting. Demna experimented with four different fittings on four different body types. The musclebound men who opened the show were wearing looks made for their body type. “It’s body-conscious for them because it was made on their body. That’s why I put them at the beginning, because it really sets the tone of how I want to approach Gucci.” Which obliquely reminded me of the way that Cristóbal Balenciaga would show his clothes on ordinary women from his hometown in Spain to prove that his technical wizardry could make anyone beautiful. Demna called his new sizing system “consumer-oriented design.” He plans to roll it out within a year.
We talked a lot on Thursday about his research and he was again adamant that this was his vision of Gucci, not based on anything from the past. He has, however, undertaken two significant projects since he arrived at the brand last year, one being “La Famiglia,” his cast of Gucci archetypes, the other a pre-fall collection called “Gucci Generation,” which drew on the Tom Ford years, the period he felt most connected to. He conceded that they were the foundation on which his runway debut rested. Hard to get away from Ford in particular when you’re talking about sex at Gucci, especially in light of Ford favourite Kate Moss closing the show in a backless gown with a diamond-studded G-string that evoked one of Tom’s more blatantly sexual gambits).
“But there is this minimalism that I mentioned to you because it’s part of my ongoing design language research here. It makes sense to do that at Gucci. If I can take out a seam somewhere, I should take it out. If we can come up with a way of making patterns that doesn’t need all the finishings… but it’s not retro minimalism. It’s more minimalist in terms of how the product is made. Gucci is really a brand, it’s not a maison with a couture master in its past. That’s liberating for me because it gives me a lot of codes I can use to reinterpret in terms of product. What is Gucci? What can I connect to? I had lunch with Carine Roitfeld last summer, and I asked her, ‘What is Gucci for you?’ She said, ‘It’s a flirt.’ Yes, Gucci is a flirt. The playfulness is very human.”
I had to remind myself of that on Friday while Demna’s parade rolled by. When we spoke before the launch of “La Famiglia” last October, he promised that his quirky cast of characters would be a whole community come showtime. Someone had suggested it was more like a tribe. “No, it’s not,” was his response. “Tribe is too mono. At Gucci, there is much more variety, a bigger spectrum of people who Gucci should talk to.”
That spectrum of humanity has actually been a constant throughout his career. He practically has a PhD in fashion sociology. His 93 looks on Friday included the Lollobrigida lookalikes and Muscle Marys, shuffling pigeon-tested street kids and pneumatic glamazons, silken-suited lounge lizards, a goth-y courier in motocross leathers and a Gina Gershon-wannabe in a flaring fur dress, a ballet dancer fresh from performing in an all-male “Swan Lake” and Karlie Kloss in her husband’s suit jacket thrown over a black knit and a little logo skirt, rapper Nettspend in silver python pants and lilac animalier top, Alex Consani in a glittering gold, floor-sweeping second skin. Venus emerged in a draped white dress with a deep scooped back. Adonis was swathed in a draped white t-shirt. The integration of supermodels and skaters, salon and street, his own particular pantheon of gods and goddesses, is a Demna theme. But you needed the photos afterwards to dissect a coherent collection of clothing from that morass of proposals, to take in the details and appreciate the incredible contributions from the hair and makeup teams.
Of course Demna knew about the expectations. That NYT headline, for instance. Nor was it lost on showgoers that Gucci sales have nearly halved since their 2022 peak. “I cannot do magic,” is his response. “I can only do as good as I can when I really follow my gut feeling. Who do I want to speak to? At the moment, I think who I really would love to speak to is the true fashion people who know what the meaning of fashion is. It’s not concept, it’s not the Comme des Garçons or Margiela collectors only. It’s people who truly love clothes and fashion, doesn’t matter what. I would love to establish this conversation, because I think Gucci has missed that, and it really needs it. It’s almost like this engine without fuel situation. It needs to be fueled by this fashion segment. Today I would say that is really my focus. And I need to bring the cultural relevance to the brand. It’s not only product.”
The commitment to cultural relevance coincided with an epiphany Demna had while visiting Florence with his husband Loik, who’d never seen the city. They went to the Uffizi Gallery to look at Botticelli’s “Primavera,” a seminal reference in Gucci’s history, but while they were looking for it, they came across Botticelli’s masterpiece “The Birth of Venus.” “Probably my favourite painting,” says Demna. He almost broke down in tears. When they left the Uffizi, they found themselves face to face with Palazzo Gucci, across the Piazza della Signoria. It was a sign. “Michelangelo, Botticelli, Gucci, the narrative of Italian culture. I mean, the Italian Renaissance kind of informs everything that I like in art, body, proportion, everything. But Gucci is part of that. And it’s all coming from Florence. So that’s my second job at Gucci. Apart from doing a product and bringing my vision into it, is also bringing this cultural relevance to it.”
“It’s not like a project,” Demna continued. “It’s more about who are the people I work with, who are the people I want to wear Gucci. At the moment, it’s a lot of musicians, because I’m so much more into music than cinema, but maybe being in LA, I will kind of get into that. It’s not people who are famous. I think cultural relevance actually never comes from the mainstream.” He invited 25 musicians from his Spotify playlist to his show on Friday. Fakemink walked, EsDeeKid sat in the front row. “I think the cultural relevance for a big brand like Gucci only works in this kind of exchange. You have to offer something back. And what Gucci would offer back to these people is a massive platform of visibility.” A few months ago, Demna and Loik went to an EsDeeKid show in a club on the outskirts of Milan. The experience was revelatory for the usually hermetic designer. He was with his people. “I never felt so in the right place in my life ever.”
I noticed how often the word “cynical” came up in the online pile-on after the show. I’ve always thought of Demna as being fiercely pragmatic, but his wide-eyed wonder at his EsDeeKid experience hinted at something else. A different kind of hunger. Innocence, naïveté even. And why not? He’s a human being who works in fashion. “We live in a world right now which is worse than it has ever been in my lifetime,” he acknowledged. “I feel like, what are we doing here? I want to be turned on by something else. I want this to somehow take away my attention from that. I feel like it should be some kind of escapism, a kind of utopia. Before, I wanted to use fashion as a tool to talk about things that had a meaning for me, that bothered me politically or socially. Which didn’t do one thing — it’s even worse now. But you can’t just do nothing. You would just stop. I feel it’s so bad now that fashion has become the place where I can dream about something or desire it or be turned on. I want to have a FOMO. I really don’t want to miss out on things. I want to desire right now. There is this urgency. I think it really has something to do with the times.”
He insisted it’s not the instant gratification of TikTok. “That’s more like a bad addiction. Like meth. I don’t think things should be instant. We need to wait for things to be well-made. What we don’t have to wait for is being into an idea, when you see something and get excited, provoking emotions in us that are not negative, that are not fear and confusion, but are clear and attractive and hot. More than ever, I need fashion to be like that for me, and Gucci is a perfect place for it. It has really helped me. When I started work on this collection, I realised I was trying to intellectualise it a lot. But Gucci is not a brand where you need to read a book to understand it. It’s a very pragmatic, down-to-earth product. It doesn’t need that dimension. So it’s almost legitimised my change of creative approach, which is very based now on my experience, my choices. I just want to be into something without trying to understand it.” Early reactions to Friday’s show suggest there were plenty of people in the audience who wished they could feel the same way. So here’s another poser for Demna: what will it take to win them over?
It’s clearly very personal for him. “When you yourself are not excited about what you do, if you cannot project yourself on wanting to pay so much money for that product, then why the hell are you doing it? I don’t want product like that in my collections. I’m not showing one thing that I’m not into, everything that is in my collection is everything I’m into. I’m excited about those things. Maybe you will be about some of them. Maybe someone else will be about the other ones. And maybe somebody will be as excited about everything as I am. But I believe in that, because I think otherwise you cannot make a good thing.”
