On a crisp February morning in Milan, a day before a make-or-break show, Demna, once the leading iconoclast of French fashion and now the artistic director of Gucci, tours his office with a curious air of calm. “ Obviously, I’m a bit stressed – but I feel good,” he says. “My cousin, who is 16 and spends her life on Roblox, heard that I was going to Gucci and was like, ‘Do you know Gucci is a word we use a lot to describe a certain state of mind? If you feel Gucci, it means you want to be crazy, meet people and be out there,’ ” Demna says with a smile. “I want to make people feel Gucci tomorrow.”
Demna Gvasalia, as he was born in Georgia (he doffed his surname five years ago), is now 45. Yet his voice seemed fully formed a fashion aeon ago, in 2014, the year he co-founded Vetements, and mere months before he was named Balenciaga’s artistic director. “It made him the most influential designer of the decade,” says Alexandre Samson, a fashion historian and curator at Palais Galliera in Paris. “He created characters that were very clear and reflective of an Eastern, post-USSR youth culture with no money, which looked to, admired and despised the Western world.”
In the studio, Demna wears loose black Adidas trousers, a black Slipknot band T-shirt and black Gucci mules. When he was young, in bourgeois Europe, his personal style was often taken as a provocation. Since then, it has become a template for mainstream luxury taste.
When Demna took the helm of Gucci last summer, the brand had spent a couple of years adrift; his arrival promised to make it rollick again. “He knows how to garner attention, how to make a moment. He has a very good tap on the cultural conscience,” the model Vivian Wilson tells me. “He designs what he wants,” says Kim Kardashian, a long-time friend and muse of Demna’s. “He’s just so unapologetically himself.” But would Demna suit so large and mainstream a brand? Gucci is the crown jewel of Kering, the luxury conglomerate, and, in an industry downturn, it has become a bellwether too. “The team have a big responsibility, because they are handling a mega brand,” says Kering CEO Luca de Meo.
Demna, who trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, was known as an arch, biting ironist. Now he surprises me by saying that he has sloughed off his conceptualism for a more immediate, sensual approach. He joins a set of Belgian conceptualists, including Matthieu Blazy and Pieter Mulier, who discovered a new sensuality at large heritage brands. “Gucci is a very pragmatic brand; it’s about product. It’s liberating not to have to conceptualise a dress just to make a dress that you love,” he says. “This is how fashion should be: more intuitive and emotional.”
For his first Gucci offering, he presented a capsule collection in the form of a film exploring the brand’s 1970s character. His next collection was a tribute to the sexy, soigné looks of the ’90s under Tom Ford. On this particular day, he’s about to show his third collection for Gucci; it’s his first runway outing and very much his own vision.
The moment harks back to 2016, when Demna gave his first show at Balenciaga. He had hits, such as the chunky Triple S trainer, but he also reached for geopolitical themes. Within three years, the house had doubled in size and had crossed a billion dollars in sales. The Washington Post, in 2019, celebrated Demna for “changing what we consider fashion”.
When I met Demna for the first time, later that year, he was living in the woods in Switzerland, with his husband, musician Loïk Gomez. Paris had become too distracting, he told me, too claustrophobic. In Switzerland, every day before work, he went tramping in nature like a figure out of a Caspar David Friedrich painting. He was planning to relaunch Balenciaga’s long-dormant couture operation. He had begun to think about the body in new and poetic ways. “I’m no longer on the dark side of the world,” he told me at the time.
It couldn’t last. A few months later the whole world went dark for the Covid pandemic and Demna’s couture debut got pushed back a year. Meanwhile the brand faced public opprobrium after releasing an ad that included children holding teddy bear bags previously shown on the runway. To many, the bears appeared to be dressed in BDSM gear. The fallout was severe. Celebrities, including Kardashian, re-evaluated their relationships with the brand. (“That was never an issue with him,” Kardashian tells me.) Soon Demna himself issued a public apology.
Demna resolved to exit the Swiss woods. “After a while, I got so bored there,” he says. “Boredom is such a scary and tricky thing for a creative person.” He and Gomez moved to Geneva, then Paris. Stimulated but restless, they continued to look for a second perch.
They landed in Los Angeles, where they bought a 1950s bungalow and started moving in the local mix. “It’s radically different, culturally speaking,” he tells me. “It’s not for no reason that Silicon Valley happened in California: there’s something about feeling more free in your head. In Europe it’s much more conservative.” On taking the job at Gucci, he moved from Paris to Milan but kept LA as his second base. “People always say, ‘Oh, I get why you’re there – you want to be far from fashion,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘Actually, no – there I’m really in the epicentre of thinking behind how we use fashion.’ Whereas in Italy, what I have is the product, the heritage, the history, the manufacturing – all those things that don’t exist in LA. It’s a pretty good balance. Gucci needs both.”
Backstage at his first show, Demna says, “ The feeling when someone falls in love with someone? I have it now.” As the house lights go down, the model Charlie Jones steps onto the runway, wearing a sleeveless white dress that is tight and reveals a tattoo on the upper thigh. “It’s the most body-conscious I’ve ever been,” Demna says. “I’ve had a really good therapist for 10 years and, finally, I’ve started to like myself.” When Kate Moss appears to end the show, in a black backless sequined dress, a cheer breaks out: an old vision is made new again.
Last autumn Kering appointed one of its most powerful leaders, Francesca Bellettini, as Gucci’s president and CEO. Her mandate, she tells me one afternoon over coffee in Milan, was immediately clear: “I know that a lot of people say Gucci is like the phoenix, going up and down and re-emerging from the ashes,” she says. “No.” She shakes her head. “We need to go up with normal growth – and stay up.”
Demna was Bellettini’s first big notion. She put the prospect to him over dinner. “He was like, ‘I can do it,’” she recalls. Just one thing: he wanted to study first. “I didn’t know so much about Gucci – I knew the film, you know?” Demna tells me. He made visits to the Gucci archive in Florence, with espionage-like cover. “I saw the whole world,” he says. “Homeware. Chairs. Umbrellas. A roulette wheel. And the most incredible collections.” He shrugs. “I was seduced.”
Demna proposed to Bellettini that he compile a presentation in which to assemble his thoughts. “ I need to convince you and myself that we can do this,” she recalls him saying. It was the holidays, and he and Gomez were in LA. “On the day I finished,” Demna says, “I showed it to my husband. He was like, ‘It gives me a Fomo feeling – I want to be that or I want to have it,’” Demna recalls. That frame clicked. “I was like, that’s what my vision of Gucci is – creating this Fomo,” he says. “The chic, the elegance, the Italian-ness of it. The dolce vita but in a nonchalant way. There’s a bit of humour but it’s not sarcastic. It’s a fun thing, quite punk, in a way – like, ‘I like myself and I don’t care what other people think.’ There’s something daring about it – it’s flamboyant. It’s confident. You know who you are.”
The LA fires started that night. Demna left with nothing but his passport and his laptop: he had not backed up his presentation. “I sent it to Kering and I was like: this is my vision… If they don’t like it, I might as well know now.” But Bellettini understood what he put forward: a freedom possible only in a house whose history was rich in product. “ What he was explaining as a liberation was the fact that the brand doesn’t come from a couture maison,” she recalls. “There isn’t a Cristóbal Balenciaga, an Yves Saint Laurent, a Christian Dior, to whom you’re always going to be compared.”
Shape has been extensively on Demna’s mind as he works on his September collection. He feels that he is ready to present a Gucci that draws on the history of the house but is his. In fashion terms, this means coming out with new silhouettes: particular configurations of form, proportion and mood, which, like the boxy Chanel jacket or the Dior hourglass of a dress, will be recognisable as the signature of his vision for the brand.
“ Personally, I’m in need of a defined Gucci silhouette, and in September I will dare myself to show it,” he says. “It’s about centimetres, it really is,” he says. “It’s about proportion. And I want to do something that also I haven’t done before, which” – he smiles – “limits the possibilities.”
He started with the mood: “ What is the feeling I want to give so a person can be like, ‘I feel Gucci’?” In consultation with Gomez, he began listing all the qualities that he wanted his new Gucci silhouette to project. Facing the blank page on his laptop one day, with his deadlines for the September runway drawing ever nearer, he wrote: “Sharp, Confident, Chic, Bold, Rich, Eccentric, Hot, Sexy, Cool.”
“Sharp as in not wobbly, not round: there is no cocoon shape at Gucci,” he explains. “Sexy and hot: they’re not the same. You can be completely covered and feel hot, but you can’t be sexy. For sexy, you need to show some body. Gucci needs to have both.”
One by one, he worked through his words, using them to define what the silhouette was and wasn’t. In the spring, he went to one of his favourite vintage men’s tailoring shops, in Rome. “It has the most meticulous selection of jackets and coats in Italian men’s tailoring – I half-emptied the store,” he says. “We’re using those pieces when I work the silhouette, in defining the shoulder line and the sleeve shape.”
A few days later, I meet Demna in the 23rd Street studio where he is holding fittings for the New York cruise show. The show’s fashion concept expresses his mercantile turn. “ I call it Gucci-core,” he tells me. “Like hard-core, but also the essence, the base, of the aesthetic” – in other words, “staples” that customers can reliably find in a Gucci shop.
“For example, this is a very important piece for me,” he says, pulling from the rack a red women’s double-breasted jacket, his version of the classic pea coat. “ I was afraid to work on it, because I don’t like pea coats: how could I make one that I really liked?” The answer to the question became a kind of key: if he could make a Gucci pea coat that he loved, then he could extend his point of view across worlds of merchandise.
The other key – and perhaps his greatest, if quietest, innovation at Gucci to date – concerned sizing. Traditionally, fashion is tailored to tall runway models and then graded up or down into standard sizes, often losing the proportional relationships. “It doesn’t consider the body type,” Demna says. “If someone is shorter and more muscled, he’s going to look like a dork.” At Gucci, he is developing a wholly new sizing system so that the integrity of a look will hold whether you’re tall and lean or short and thick. In the meantime, many cruise collection pieces exist in three different fits: a small, a medium and what might be called a Demna fit – the baggy proportions that he himself would buy.
The night of the cruise show is clear: a New York City spring caught in the hourglass of Times Square. By 8.10pm, guests have begun to arrive on Gucci’s walled-off grey carpet. “Being at Gucci, he can dream as big as he wants, right?” Kardashian says. “He can say ‘I want a show in Times Square’ and pull it off.” When Paris Hilton appears with a black fur-like coat slung over a sunflower-yellow Gucci-patterned summer dress – hot, not sexy – every phone in the audience seems to lift up.
For much of his career, Demna was known for shows that built towards an unsettled climax, but the effect here is the opposite. The sequence culminates as Cindy Crawford, at 60, dressed in a dress of long black feathers, takes the final walk, as slowly and as grandly as la passeggiata. For a long, dilated moment, the entirety of Times Square is silent, as if holding its breath.
Later that night, the party reconvenes at the Gucci Mansion. Demna is surrounded by well-wishers and in an expansive mood. “ I’m relieved that this is done, because it was very complex,” he says. “But a lot of people told me that it was 12 minutes of forgetting about whatever they were thinking before.” He smiles. “I love that.”
In this story: hair, Esther Langham; make-up, Aaron de Mey; manicurist, Raphaël Park Charles.
Fashion photographs: Produced by Starkman & Associates.