Gucci presents their Fall/Winter 26 collection

Today, nearly a year after Demna was hired to boldly remake Gucci following his maverick decade run at Balenciaga, he finally made his runway debut. The monumentality of the set that had been erected in the Palazzo Delle Scintille was testament to parent company Kering’s ambitions. And to Demna’s own. A trip to Florence, where the Gucci Museum stands opposite the Uffizi in the Piazza Della Signoria, inspired the set: “I realized there how important Gucci is in the Italian culture, that it’s kind of part of the whole Michelangelo and Botticelli and Donatello. So we built a museum for the show,” Demna said—a “museum” complete with simulacra of Roman statuary, scanned and reproduced with the Uffizi’s permission. “My idea was to put Gucci back in the cultural spotlight,” he added.

At Balenciaga, he was equal parts couturier and provocateur, producing silhouette-shifting fashion and engaging with sociopolitical issues of the day, from climate change to the war in Ukraine. “His creative power is exactly what Gucci needs,” said Kering’s chairman and CEO, François-Henri Pinault, at the time of Demna’s appointment. But Demna didn’t trade labels to repeat himself. Gucci is a different business, exponentially larger (though revenue has dipped precipitously since Alessandro Michele’s exit in 2022) and rooted in fine leather goods, not boundary-pushing fashion. “I’ve switched off this intellectual desire to impress myself,” he said at a preview. “I can do a jacket inside out with sleeves that become a collar; I’ve done those things.”

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Instead, he’s gone body conscious, shrink-wrapping his models in muscle tees and jeans or stretchy tube dresses—clothes, as Amelia Gray said, that are for the gal on her way from the club to Pilates. “Gucci is fun,” Demna put it simply backstage. He’d hired a crew of Gen Z digital natives to get the message across. The underground rapper Fakemink made a big impression, pausing mid-runway to dip into his shoulder-slung Gucci fanny pack and check his cell phone, but not as big as Gavin Weiss, a football player from Calgary, who wore a compression polo so tight it looked like his biceps might pop. Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk’s trans daughter, modeled, as did the YouTube vlogger Sydney Carson and Elisha and Renee Herbert, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue’s first twin models in 50 years, apparently.

Gucci’s Tom Ford–fueled late-’90s and early-’00s apex was an obvious template. “For my generation, his Gucci really introduced sex appeal into fashion,” Demna said. Only here it was in hyperdrive, pitched on precipitously high stiletto pumps for the girls, and for the guys, refreshed versions of Michele’s era-defining kangaroo fur–lined loafer mules, perhaps not a fair deal. Michele was in the front row, sandwiched between Donatella Versace on one side and Nicky and Paris Hilton on the other. Paris’s famous copyrighted catchphrase, “That’s hot,” reflected this show’s intention.

After the club and following the reformer machine, Demna’s Gucci crew might choose a suit—the tailoring was one of the collection’s strong points, cut fluid and often in a fabric with a high sheen. Or they could engage in some bourgeois Milanese lady cosplay in brushed shearlings with a horse-bit bag in the crook of their arms. Demna has smartly reworked the house’s iconic bags to feel lighter and look less formal; the Jackie now comes in a crushable leather with a cool attitude. After dark, the vibe was princesses and their playthings, with the women in formal embellished gowns, some with a side slit flashing a fair bit of taut glute, and the men—boys, really—barefoot in what can only be described as sequined pajamas.

Kate Moss, reprising a role she played in many a Gucci show past, closed the show wearing a slink of a dress that was bare in the back all the way past her bedazzled double-G G-string. “I want to make people ‘feel Gucci’ tomorrow,” Demna reflected. “My cousin, who is 16 and spends her life on Roblox—when she heard that I was going to Gucci, she asked me, ‘Do you know what Gucci is? It’s not just a brand It’s a word we use to describe a certain state of mind. If you feel Gucci, it means you want to do stuff and be crazy and meet people and be, like, out there.’” Demna has everybody’s attention now.

Vogue.com