On Saturday night, the fashion crowd and the likes of Kim Kardashian, Lindsey Lohan, Mariah Carey, Iman, Lil Uzi Vert, Stormzy, Willy Chavarria and more were in the most unlikely of places: Times Square. Gucci had taken over the tourist-packed New York epicenter — including all its iconic billboards — to stage artistic director Demna’s debut cruise show for the Italian luxury house.
Taking over Times Square was no easy feat, Demna divulged during a preview, yet Saturday night’s show was impressively well organized and ran smoothly even as the world outside the high black barriers carried on as usual, honking horns, sirens and all.
“We’re using [Times Square] as a set to the maximum. It is a very ambitious idea, but in a way, I like the fact that it’s out of control in some way,” Demna told WWD ahead of the show. “I’m very specific, precise, almost OCD, with what I show, and for me to do that, it’s really one-of-a-lifetime situation where I actually don’t have control over anything, except the clothes. You’ll see the clothes, they’re very studied.”
Amid the always wafting smells of street meat and roasted nuts, the Gucci takeover kicked off with an 8:30 p.m. pre-show video montage that Demna explained was about contrasting the venue’s consumerism and information saturation against the “beauty of the world,” projected across the rolling digital billboards.
He initially started with focusing on this macro beauty of the planet and human relationships, which he said are often overlooked or taken for granted. So Demna showcased serene nature scenes and contrasted the found footage with comical, delightful advertisements of faux and real Gucci products that spoke to the idea of exploring “this manifestation of what Gucci can be in the future as a brand,” he said.
Demna added he really “went for it,” with ideas spanning from Gucci Acqua, Gucci Gym and Palazzo Gucci Hotel to Gucci Pets and even Gucci Life longevity supplements. Perhaps Gucci GLP-1? “Not yet, but who knows,” the artistic director quipped.
“I love that contrast — Gucci is quirky, Gucci is a bit fun, not in a slapstick way, but we needed to twist it somehow. We needed to break that beautiful symphony,” he said. “Whenever you watch something, it’s this annoying interruption of someone wanting to sell you something, which is kind of going back to what Times Square is about.”
His collection played into this (and the ethos of the broader business’) salable, merchandising ethos with the collection’s strong emphasis on Gucci Core: his new offering of wardrobing staples, here lensed and twisted into New York characters. Focusing on his wide-reaching Gucci customer, outerwear was cut both lengthy and cropped; suiting ‘90s skinny or looser, and skirts short and tight or trapezoid and pleated.
Gucci Cruise 2027
Giovanni Giannoni/WWD
Commuting businessmen wore tailored pinstripe banker suits, topped with fittingly giant backpacks or multiple new logoed tote bags, while many of his bodega-going meets Ladies-Who-Lunch women were wrapped in lofty shearling and reversible technical outerwear, with iPhones, yoga mats or floral bouquets in hand.
“It’s really basics in some way. The thing is, it’s obvious, but it just doesn’t exist in our case. We don’t find it at the Gucci store now,” Demna said of his ultimate non-basic-basics. “What you see here is a garment vocabulary, and then you can compose your own words with it.”
See his perfect uptown red peacoat in the same English wool used for Britain’s Royal Guards; a sexy downtown cropped leather jacket and matching miniskirt or a great pencil skirt, extending his study of the Tom Ford era, and nods to the Italian house’s icons a la a beautiful hand-painted Flora ‘60s airline leather coat with racing details, which felt fitting for any of the city’s neighborhoods.
There were plenty of great pieces but some got lost in the shuffle amid the show’s 10 percent of seasonal, fashion-forward attire, like the red and green Web stripe bandeau tops. The edgier pieces at times didn’t seem as assured as the Core ones, and often bore traces of what the designer did during his much acclaimed tenure at Balenciaga.
But overall his megawatt cast amplified Demna’s vision of being not only about how the clothes are styled, but who wears them — i.e. Tom Brady strutting the runway in head to toe leather, Alex Consani in a vampy sheer caftan and piles of necklaces, a brown-haired Paris Hilton in a bright yellow print dress and Cindy Crawford shutting down the show in a black feathered gown.
“It would have been kind of impossible to just jump into it and be like, ‘This is my vision, and there you go,’ because I first needed to like create that stable platform that clarifies, cleanses the confusion, and clarifies what Gucci is through my lens, because it’s obviously my subjective vision of it, to be able to build on that Demna version of Gucci,” he said.
The cruise collection was meant to be the culmination of his prior studies of the house — La Famiglia, Generation Gucci and Primavera — and he turned these and his already well-known vernacular into his most commercially desirable collection yet.
