Milan Day Four: Gucci and Demna — Milan’s Main Act

MILAN — A year after joining Gucci, Demna finally made his runway debut for the brand. The designer’s “La Famiglia” and “Generation Gucci” collections, issued as lookbooks late last year, were explorations of the house’s archive, whereas today’s outing was billed as his full-throated vision.

The challenge Demna faces is huge: Restore the fashion authority of Italy’s largest luxury brand, where sales have nearly halved since their 2022 peak. And as he developed his response, he delved deep into the culture of the house and its Florentine roots. Kudos for that. But what Demna ultimately sent down the runway was a seen-this-a-million-times-before effort to capture a certain way of being Italian that never lived up to the grandeur of the travertino set.

The intentionally ecumenical offering — after all, at Gucci’s scale it needs to appeal to a broad church of clients — made for a co-ed collection of pieces already so deeply ingrained in the collective imagination — leggings and muscle shirts, anyone? — that they looked undesigned, certainly not the offspring of an auteur with such a brilliant mind and the means a house like Gucci can provide.

Instead, it felt like a clever merchandising operation propped up by an insistence that sex — fulfilled or not — sells. How else can one explain the minidresses glued to the body, the muscles rippling under spandex? At times, it felt like a joke — not a good one — at the expense of the Italian maranza and their like: the tacky couples from the banlieu dressed to the nines in, well, Gucci dupes.

It was all very Demna, but for what? It certainly made for polarising outing, generating the kind of controversy — and therefore visibility — the designer has courted in the past. It was also a clear and commercially viable offer. But one might have expected more from Demna in terms of design acceleration.

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It was a different scenario altogether earlier in the day at Tod’s, where Matteo Tamburini worked around the body, simultaneously protecting and revealing it, all the while maximising workmanship while minimising the wow factor, eschewing easy sensationalism in favour of a subtlety that seduces. Tamburini hopped on one of the season’s bandwagons, the dialogue between masculine and feminine dressing, but he did it his way, mixing voluminous coats, belted around the body in a tight embrace, and sensational intarsia leather scarf dresses, large parkas and long knit dresses, all delivered with an unassuming manner that was refreshing.

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Over at Moschino, Adrian Appiolaza wisely steered away from the staid old Moschino-isms which he’s been exploring ad nauseam since he began his tenure at the label to delve into his Argentinian roots. The results swung from mannish gaucho tailoring to tango feminine seduction, Mafalda to a discombobulating nod to the head styling of Alexander McQueen’s Voss collection. This is exactly the problem with Appiolaza: design by quotation of the past and a serious lack of editing skills. There was a lot going on and little in the way of a clear message.

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Galib Gassanoff’s focus, by contrast, is clear and sharp. He starts his collections, always, with an excavation into his own Georgian roots, which he then translates into sombrely poetic silhouettes that are sculptural on women and barbarian on men, to astonishing results. There is no small amount of gloom and doom behind such a vision, but Gassanoff has the rare ability to handle both heavy concepts and heavy materials with a lyrical lightness, leaving one dreamy and craving for more. His stubbornness in operating outside of the narrow-mindedness of Milan’s fashion cliques is also admirable. He is a fashion force worth cherishing.

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