Welcome back to The Week Ahead, your guide to the coming week’s most important events. It’s Vikram Alexei Kansara, standing in for Brian Baskin who is on holiday.
If Paris Fashion Week was ground-zero for big creative reboots last season, this time around it’s Milan’s turn. Kering, LVMH and OTB all have significant skin in the game this Milan Fashion Week with new designer runway debuts at Gucci, Fendi and Marni.
- Feb 25, 2pm: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Fendi debut
- Feb 26, 6pm: Meryll Rogge’s Marni debut
- Feb 27, 2pm: Demna’s Gucci debut
Demna’s Gucci Gauntlet
Kering has the most riding on the week: Milan’s main event is Demna’s first show for flagship brand Gucci, where sales have nearly halved since their 2022 peak. Last season’s look book and film premiere were enough to catapult Gucci back into the fashion conversation and draw customers back to stores in key markets, a testament to Demna’s skill. But sales still slid 10 percent in the holiday quarter as the brand awaits a more complete creative overhaul. Meanwhile, rivals like Dior and Chanel have charged ahead with their own revamps, dropping collections by new designers at the start of the year.
At Kering’s smaller Balenciaga unit, Demna set the fashion agenda with bold, subversive propositions that sent sales soaring. At Gucci, he’s tasked with doing it again. But the challenge in front of him is both bigger and more complex: Friday’s show will need to work hard to reassert the fashion authority of Italy’s largest luxury label, while balancing that push with Gucci’s efforts to elevate and stabilise its brand substrate.
What can we expect? In September, Demna told Tim Blanks: “How could I make a new minimalism in fashion without it looking like the 60s? That’s what I want to do with Gucci from February onwards when I introduce my personal vision. I want to build on the duality as well, because Gucci is not just that, it’ll always be the extra flamboyance and craziness in my way. But the minimalism excites me more.”
MGC’s Return to Fendi
This week, the stakes are high for LVMH, too, with Maria Grazia Chiuri set to unveil her vision for Roman fur and leather house Fendi, a major contributor to the group’s fashion sales, on Wednesday. For Chiuri, who takes the reins from Silvia Venturini Fendi, a third-generation member of the label’s founding family, the new post is a homecoming in more ways than one. The designer is a Rome native who worked for Fendi for most of the 1990s and played a role in developing the brand’s blockbuster Baguette bag.
In her previous role at LVMH stablemate Dior, Chiuri helped to quadruple sales with a commercially savvy offer, spiked with a potent feminine-meets-feminist message and collaborations with global craftspeople. Can she bring fresh momentum to Fendi while maintaining the link to its origin story, at a time when appetite for fur is in decline?
The Marni Challenge
Elsewhere this week, Belgian designer Meryll Rogge will stage her first show for Marni on Thursday. Owner OTB struggled to consistently commercialise the crafty vision of longtime designer Francesco Risso, who exited the label last June, and is betting on the Antwerp Academy-trained newcomer to help turn things around. Rogge’s work for her namesake label has won her accolades, including last year’s Andam grand prize, and recalls Consuelo Castiglioni’s founding vision for Marni with its playful, eclectic style.
“Meryll impressed us with the sensitivity she brought to reinterpreting the brand’s DNA, offering a contemporary vision that embraces Marni globally and across all its dimensions,” OTB chairman Renzo Rosso said last July when Rogge was hired.
— Vikram Alexei Kansara
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