Happy Day 1 of Shark Week!
Today, we’re on the ground at Milan Fashion Week, where there were exciting debuts from Meryll Rogge at Marni, Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi, and—most anticipated of all—Demna at Gucci. Nicole Phelps; Vogue Italia’s head of editorial content, Francesca Ragazzi; and Vogue contributor Luke Leitch were there to take it all in, and The Run-Through was right there with them.
The question going into the Gucci show was: who is Demna now? After a decade of deconstruction and conceptual provocation at Balenciaga—jackets made from trousers, outrageous couture wrapped in 50 meters of tulle, and the like—the designer stepped into one of fashion’s most iconic Italian houses with an eye toward the new.
“It’s not the same Demna,” Phelps said immediately after the show. “At Balenciaga he was an experimentalist. This was foundational.”
“It was definitely a new Gucci,” Leitch added, “and a new Demna.”
Elsewhere, at Marni, Meryll Rogge brought her knitwear expertise and a genuine emotional connection to the brand: she’d purchased her first pair of Marni platforms with her first paycheck as an assistant at Marc Jacobs, and wore a Marni skirt to her brother’s wedding as a teenager.
“She was born to do this job,” Phelps said.
At Moschino, meanwhile, creative director Adrian Appiolaza went back to his Argentine roots, finding inspiration in the landmarks, monuments, and icons of his home country. “Identity is one of the key words of the season here in Milan—designers thinking about who they are and why they’re in business, and really digging into that,” Phelps observed after the show.
Next stop? Paris!