“For 10 years, I tried to impress, and I tried to impress myself. Show that I was a smart designer. At Gucci, I got this sudden rush of emotion. I realized I can create from an emotional space — fashion that triggers emotion and feelings. Either you love it or hate it,” said Demna backstage after his first runway show for Gucci held in Milan’s Palazzo Delle Scintille.
It’s been almost a year since he was announced as the creative director of Gucci during a briefing meeting hosted by now Gucci CEO Francesca Bellettini in Paris. Bellettini, who at the time was deputy CEO of Gucci’s parent company Kering, said of the house: “It’s a company which, whenever you light up that spark of creativity and of artistic vision, it performs.”
Gucci has indeed been in need of a spark ever since Alessandro Michele’s departure from the helm at the end of 2022. Over the past three years, largely due to an industry-wide recession, the company’s sales have nearly halved, dropping from over €10 billion in 2022 to around €6 billion in 2025. Making up about 40% of the group’s sales, Gucci is also Kering’s biggest brand, so the stakes are high.
No one can argue that Demna doesn’t have the spark, though. Through his work at Balenciaga and before that at Vetements, the Georgian designer defined how we all dressed for more than a decade with his oversized silhouettes, streetwear experiments, and “ugly” accessories.
Over the past six months or so, while he explored Gucci’s archives and history, the designer gave us a sense of his vision for the brand through La Famiglia and Generation Gucci — his spring and pre-fall collections, which were both presented via lookbook (although La Famiglia also famously involved a film directed by Spike Jonze and starring Demi Moore). “My Gucci aesthetic is quite body-conscious, both for boy and girl,” he told Luke Leitch in December 2025.
That update of the designer’s own codes beamed in Palazzo Delle Scintille today, within which a set had been built specifically for the occasion to resemble a museum, complete with replicas of Roman sculptures currently in the Uffizi Galleries.
Kate Moss, Anok Yai, and Alex Consani were just three of the many famous names who walked down the runway, holding pretend cigarettes and real bags at the crook of their elbow — just like Paris Hilton, who sat front row next to her sister Nicky, did in the noughties. The bodies, meanwhile, reminded this writer of Bret Easton Ellis novels, in that the men were comically buff, and the women’s hipbones were sticking out.