This time around, Demna seemed to be speaking more earnestly about glamour and style, and to a customer base that fashion often pretends is not there.
“Gucci moves easily between aristocracy and pop culture,” he wrote, “[between] Florence and Hollywood, good taste and bad taste (whatever that means), heritage and mass desire, belonging and rebellion, and the interplay between the two.”
The intention appeared to be to embrace the multitude of Gucci wearers from bratty aristocrats to the new bourgeois to the lads buying outlet merchandise. There was lots to want to buy on the runway, and it was presented in a variety of convincing suggestions. It is clever of Demna to want to present Gucci as the luxury house where there is something for everyone rather than pretending like it only sells to the most tasteful. After all, the wealthiest of people don’t always have the best taste.
And yet Demna’s imitation of the real world on the runway felt more like a cartoon than an invitation to the outsider, this often invisible but very real customer base, to join the party. The show and its meticulous replication of the real-world, of Florentine glamour, of the existing Gucci wearer, read almost like a meme parodying people with “bad taste,” albeit a successful one.
The best part, other than the genius staging of the street outside the pretend store featuring passerby throughout a whole day, was Demna’s cast. It featured a combination of supermodels like Alex Consani and Anok Yai, socialites including Poppy Delevingne and Olympia of Greece, and OG influencer Tina Leung.
The cast gave the show a certain gravitas, and exemplified Demna’s pop cultural prowess.
“I woke up to a message from Juicy, who works with Pier Giorgio [the casting director], asking me if I wanted to walk,” Leung said via voice note the evening after the show. This was her first time walking a runway of this scale. “Demna’s Gucci is so fucking cunty,” Leung said. “He likes to project us back to us. I find it a reflection of our times. I love the different characters.”
