How Demna Tried to Make Gucci an Adjective Again with Debut Show at Milan Fashion Week

When Demna (it’s all first-name basis hereon – like Madonna) took over a whole Piazza in Milan on Friday for his primetime afternoon show during Milan Fashion Week, the fashion world, film world, and pop culture icons descended on the city. It was the designer’s debut show. Last season, he chose to show a film starring Demi Moore – a buzzy name right after her accolades for The Substance – seamlessly blending Gucci archetypes like “the influencer”, “the editor”, anointing them as La Famiglia, aka The Family. So when a runway show is on the cards, it of course has to pack all the high notes of a fashion week debut. 

The fervour with which Demna’s Gucci Primavera debut has been dissected and debated is akin to not many other debuts these past few seasons (we do live in a time of fashion designer churn, with now finally the dust settling just a little bit for us to make sense of signatures and intentions for creative direction at the biggest luxury houses today).

It was a polarising show. Let’s just put it out there. It wasn’t an “Oh, I loved it camp,” or a “Dear lord, what was that?!” camp (although one would argue that the comments section makes a case for the latter). What the show did, in all its bare-bodied, thong-peeking-through-dresses glory, was to start a conversation. One that takes “gauche”, “bad taste”, “tacky” and serves it up on a lino-masquerading-as-marble flooring show set – and asks the question: what’s even real anymore? 

Think about it. As we all gathered within a set built from scratch for the show – inspired by the designer’s visit to the Uffizi Gallery before the show – we were surrounded by reproductions of Italian heritage, eons of culture, icons of great taste, including recreations of chiselled marble sculptures that exist in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. But none of them were real, none of them were even marble.

And then, if you looked around the room, you saw an intriguing mix of celebrities. There was Paris Hilton, of course, but also Georgina Rodríguez (Christiano Ronaldo’s wife who has a highly popular Netflix documentary on her life), Demi Moore dressed in leather, unrecognisable sporting a bob, carrying her dog Pilaf, Alia Bhatt also enacting a character in a leather coat and horse-bit heels, and XL bug-eye sunglasses. You couldn't make sense of it all even if you tried. Because just like the lino-clad room surrounding us with layers of historical references, there were layers and layers of thinking behind this. One thing was clear: It was a call to be a bit unserious, to bring costume back into fashion, to flip the script on bad taste through satire, but also to keep questioning what’s real and what’s fake. 

And when the clothes came out, it became increasingly clear that characters and archetypes is how Demna is making sense of the world right now. 

There were buff bodies, men in muscle tees, gym bro walks, bodies on full display, extremely skinny silhouettes, matching skinny heels — the show was an extreme sport. It was late ‘90s, early aughts revival, with a big dose of affection and reference for Tom Ford’s era at Gucci, where the GG logo came sprawled on everything and the horsebit precariously held together slinky dresses.

However, as we step into this make-believe world of characters and costumes, what remains to be seen is how much of this will continue to be satire, or whether it’s quickly becoming a condoning of a culture that is actually in bad taste.

For now, though, as Demna said in his open letter ahead of the show, his Gucci era is when Gucci once again becomes an adjective. He wrote: “Gucci is drama, passion, excess, contradiction, love and hate, triumph and collapse, pride and vulnerability, perseverance, chaos, genius. Everything you could say about a human being, you can say about Gucci. I see Gucci as a person. Someone with a wild, unforgettable past and unmistakable codes… Above the product, Gucci is culture, it is a way of thinking and a way of being. Gucci needs to become a feeling. Gucci must become an adjective.”

Humans are flawed, and in their intentional ridiculousness on the runway (including one model scrolling on his phone as we walked, and the other pulling up his baggy metallic trousers mid-walk while exposing a Gucci monogrammed underwear) – they showed us a mirror to our own dystopian reality.