The Demna Gucci SS27 collection, shown at L’Officiel Ibiza-covered Milan Fashion Week, was the most complete statement he has yet made for the house: a year in the making, and rather persuasive for it.
Demna took twelve months to research and consider before arriving at a single, defining conclusion about what Gucci actually is. ‘Gucci stands for being rooted in the desire to belong to a more glamorous world, and in the audacity to make that world in your own image.’ It sounds straightforward when you put it like that. The difficulty, of course, is making that idea feel true in clothes rather than merely plausible in a press release, and this collection largely managed it.
The Shop: A Set Built on Serious Intent
Demna called the show ‘The Shop’, and meant it literally. The venue was a full-scale, fully merchandised replica of the new boutique concept he will begin rolling out next month: marble walls, plush couches, dark wood cladding, and display cabinets stocked with pieces from all four of his previous Gucci collections alongside the incoming AW26 line. Models perused the shelves as they moved through the space. One VIC was overheard asking about the products; orders, apparently, were being taken on the front row. It was a bold conflation of retail theatre and runway, and it made the point directly: Demna, brought in to lift sales at Kering’s flagship brand, is thinking about what makes people want to buy.
His answer is variety. ‘I want Gucci to be a place where those who appear to have nothing in common can meet, connect and inspire one another. Because Gucci is a space of possibility, a place where anyone can be whoever they choose.’ The casting made the argument more eloquently than any manifesto could.
A Congregation of Characters, Dressed to Their Desires
Candice Swanepoel wore a glitzy crystal mini dress, playing, as the show framing had it, the girl who knows precisely what she has. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley arrived in a vast, fluffy shearling coat cinched at the back with an oversized horsebit, embodying what the show labelled the rich bitch with a kind of amused authority. A fake-tanned model played the WAG in body-con leather. Real-life aristos and socialites, Poppy Delevingne, Olympia of Greece, and Sabine Getty, wore the equestrian princess looks: jodhpurs, riding boots, the kind of clothes that communicate a certain inherited ease. There was a wealthy grandma in a chic belted trench coat with its collar popped; a trophy wife in prim tweed; eccentric, punky Sloanes in pleated tartan kilts worn with rugby shirts and oversized leather bombers.
Demna admitted that ‘sexy is easier for me’, but said he pushed himself deliberately into less comfortable territory. He made a study of what he called posh dress codes, then described his version of them as ‘broken bourgeoisie’: a phrase that covers a great deal of this collection’s knowing, slightly subversive charm. The men were equally well-drawn. Slick Italian playboys in ankle-flashing trousers and driving loafers worn without socks, off-duty hedge funders in white jeans and waxed jackets, sleazy gigolos in shrunken bombers, punky club kids with wide belts carrying three horsebit closures, and boys in broad-shouldered power suits with black eyeliner, as though they had gone clubbing between the office and the show.
WWD noted that the collection carried echoes of Demna’s time at Balenciaga: Gothic tailoring, oversized proportions, and elongated shoes visible in the silhouette. The observation is fair, but the Gucci surface is distinct enough that the references read as fluency rather than repetition. A designer’s sensibility does not simply evaporate when they change houses, and what reads as a signature at one address becomes, at another, simply the way they see.
The product itself was genuinely covetable. Splendid oversized leather bombers, slinky goddess gowns, chisel-toe loafers, metal-heeled stilettos, and pristine white jeans all made a convincing case for the house’s commercial ambitions. The SS27 collection is, as Demna put it, ‘my complete personal vision for the brand.’ On this evidence, the vision and the business are, at last, pointing in the same direction. The new boutique concept begins rolling out next month: the shop is open, in every sense.
See the full collection at Gucci.
