Inside Demna’s Gucciverse: How Fashion’s Restless Disrupter Is Reinvigorating the Global Mega-Brand

On this particular day, the collection he’s about to show is an account of Gucci in the present: his own vision, joining him to a generation of Belgian conceptualists, including Matthieu Blazy and Pieter Mulier, that discovered a new sensuality at large heritage brands. (So far, the moves have registered: While it is by most measures too early to see major sales effects, store traffic rose from the release of the first capsule collection.) From a rack hung with a few pieces that will appear on the runway the next day, Demna extracts coats that look like fur but are actually the more ubiquitous agricultural by-product, shearling, trimmed on a bias and stitched with muslin for an effect as light as a windbreaker in the hand.

Lightness is everything, Demna now thinks—lightness and speed. On arriving at Gucci, he discovered that all the studio’s prototypes were sewn off-site. One of the first changes he made was to create a Gucci atelier on-site, so that garments could be made more quickly—more industrially—and edited not on paper but in the round, with pins and scissors.

Demna takes up a couple classic handbags that he also made lighter and more supple, and he shows off two exquisite dresses on mannequins—one purple, with a classic Gucci pattern; the other in shimmering gold sequins. Beyond these displays, his studio is curiously empty, as if it, too, has been subjected to a lightness regime. Demna seems suddenly aware of the absence.

“ I don’t want to show you too many things,” he says with a playful smile. “I want the show to be a surprise.”

Many people trace Demna’s touch—if not his sensibility—to four spirited years he spent working at Maison Martin Margiela early in his career, overseeing the women’s ready-to-wear collections. “ He absolutely understood the process and the way of thinking behind the whole brand: the idea of repurposing”—Margiela, like Demna, was known for using vintage pieces as a starting point—“and the idea, also, of playing with society,” Samson says. At Vetements, Demna applied these processes to his own style. There were hoodies with raised or pointed shoulders, oversized jackets. As a self-conscious young man, he had taken to wearing oversized clothes as a form of self-concealment; now, he began reshaping the normative body into new and unusual forms, to thrilling effects. “At the time, there was really nothing else happening in Paris,” Julien Charrier, who started work as an intern at Vetements in 2016 and is now Demna’s chief of staff, tells me. “He was bringing something that was completely out of the box, very fresh, very young, very street-culture.” Within a year, the label was being worn—or imitated—by Jared Leto and Ye, then known as Kanye West. “He was always just so cool,” says Kardashian, who met Demna shortly after Vetements launched, before there was a storefront, and spent hours simply trying on pieces at a holding warehouse in Paris in the middle of the night.

In 2016, Demna gave his first show at Balenciaga. (He continued designing for both labels for years.) He had hits like the chunky Triple S sneaker and the wide-collar Swing shirt, but he also reached for geopolitical themes. In March 2022, after the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, his show featured models trudging through a snowstorm in yellow and blue. 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, late that year, he was living in the woods, in Switzerland, with his husband, the musician Loïk Gomez. Paris had become too distracting, he told me, too claustrophobic, too much. In Switzerland he saw almost no one, but every day before work, donning high boots and an overcoat, he went tramping into nature like a figure out of Caspar David Friedrich. He was planning to relaunch Balenciaga’s long-dormant couture operations. 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-19 pandemic. The remote woods of Switzerland proved an oddly perfect place to endure the lockdown, but Demna’s couture debut got pushed back a year. Meanwhile, the brand’s apparent provocations seemed to compound. In 2022, Balenciaga severed its ties with Ye, who had been one of its most prominent and stalwart public supporters, after Ye made what was widely taken to be antisemitic posts on social media. (In January of this year, Ye apologized in a full-​page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal.) Only weeks later, the brand—​and Demna—​faced public opprobrium after releasing an ad campaign which included children, dressed in its kids line, holding teddy bear bags previously shown on the runway. To many, the bears appeared to be dressed in BDSM gear. Eagle-eyed viewers noted that another ad, for a spring 2023 collection, which included a desk messed with papers, appeared to include a page of the opinion in the Supreme Court case United States v. Williams, which concerned child pornography.

The fallout was severe. Close celebrity affiliates of Balenciaga, including Kardashian, reevaluated their relationships with the brand. (“That was never an issue with him,” Kardashian tells me. “Once we did an investigation and we saw where things happened, we were comfortable moving forward.”) Soon Demna himself issued a public apology. “It was inappropriate to have kids promote objects that had nothing to do with them,” he wrote. “As much as I would sometimes like to provoke a thought through my work, I would NEVER have an intention to do that with such an awful subject as child abuse that I condemn.”

“Provocation is like humor, and humor cannot be stupid,” he tells me now, when I ask whether the experience compelled him to reassess the role of provocation in his life and work. “It involves a kind of nuance. Provocation is stupid when you’re the only person laughing.”

Demna had resolved to exit the Swiss woods. “After a while, I got so bored there,” he tells me. “Boredom is such a scary and tricky thing for a creative person—I always want to discover new things.” He and Gomez moved into Geneva but eventually found themselves back in Paris, stimulated but restless as ever. “I  love Paris, but it only works as a long-distance relationship for me,” Demna tells me. “I lived there for 15 years, which is the longest I’ve been in one place in my life. But I didn’t like what fashion started to become while I was living in Paris full-time: safe, boring, beige, wannabe bourgeois, flat, superficial—all the things fashion shouldn’t be.” With the thought that a part-time life in Paris was the best kind of Paris life, he and Gomez continued looking for a second perch.

They landed in LA: the city where Demna had proposed to Gomez and a place where he had always dreamed of living. They bought a 1950s bungalow and started moving in the local mix. To this day, Demna told me, he has a much more active social life in California than in Europe.

“It’s radically different, culturally speaking,” he tells me. “Modernity is there. It’s not for no reason that Silicon Valley happened in California: There’s something about feeling more free in your head about how we do stuff, how we dress, how we express ourselves.
In Europe it’s much more conservative.”

On taking the job at Gucci, he moved from Paris to Milan (“Also Europe, but a very different mentality, and so industrial in terms of fashion—I love it”) but kept Los Angeles 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 epicenter 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,” he adds. “Gucci needs both.”

Backstage at his first show, Demna squeezes up and down the model lineup, which curls along a hallway thick with hairdressers and security personnel. “ The feeling when someone falls in love with someone? I have it now,” he tells me. “I’m also worried about one million things—the shoes, the sweat—but we can’t control these things, so worrying is useless, apparently.” He grins. “I read that somewhere.”

The show will be held in the Palazzo delle Scintille, a large hall in Milan that Demna refashioned as a venue for Gucci. He had been inspired by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the house’s historical and spiritual home, and, with the Uffizi’s permission, had some classical statues there replicated. They line the periphery of the Palazzo’s inner hall, which proceeds down coliseum-like steps to a long central corridor that will serve as the runway. “ We built a museum for the show, basically,” Demna says. “My idea was to put Gucci back into the spotlight of the Italian Renaissance.” There were, of course, other objectives too. As guests take their seats in the Palazzo delle Scintille, someone whispers, “There are so many supermodels here.”

True enough. The cast includes Kate Moss, Karlie Kloss, and Gabbriette, but also figures unaccustomed to the runway, such as the rappers Fakemink and Nettspend. (“ I invited, in the cast, people that I always wanted to meet,” Demna explains to me.)

As the house lights go down, a bright shaft appears down the runway. The model Charlie Jones steps into it, wearing a high-​collar sleeveless white dress and carrying a classic black Gucci bag. The dress is tight and revealing enough to display 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.”) Jones, a trans man, cross-steps briskly, followed by a gym-built man in white pants and a similar shirt. The show, like all of Demna’s at Gucci, mixes men’s and women’s looks. “ I think the idea of splitting fashion by gender is very old—I think there’s a systemic glitch in this,” he says. When the muscleman walks past, somebody cries, “Wow.”

Uncharacteristically for Demna, who at Balenciaga was known for his raucous, intensifying presentations, the show blooms into poetic sequined dresses and male models who walk barefoot. “ It’s very romantic, very like Botticelli, almost like they came off the painting in a way,” he explains. “It’s a different type of beauty than I’ve ever touched on—more classic beauty, but pushed, exaggerated.” When Moss appears to end the show, in a black backless sequined dress, a cheer breaks out: An old vision is made new again.

In 1993, Demna’s family fled their hometown of Sukhumi, Georgia, under threat of ethnic cleansing, and landed in Tbilisi. One of his first jobs, at 17, was translating Reuters copy for Georgian TV, and, since then, he has rarely succeeded in outrunning the news. (On September 11, 2001, as horrific reports streamed in New York, it was the young Demna who did the simultaneous translation for the Georgian audience.) Nor has he long settled in one place.

That restlessness, paradoxically, has helped to root him in his new professional home. The unimprovably named Guccio Gucci, the brand’s founder and the son of a straw-hat maker, opened a shop in Florence’s Via della Vigna Nuova in 1921; by the late ’30s, he was making handbags. From the start, the brand offered sly winks to its self-invention: Gucci’s crest did not include a soldier, as an aristocratic crest would have, but a figure carrying aloft two luggage bags. Guccio’s son Aldo helped push the company into belts, shoes, and gloves and excelled at industrial improvisation. Faced with wartime scarcities, the house made handbags with bamboo handles. By 1960, it had opened a shop in New York; soon it was in London, Paris, and LA. It took on ready-to-wear fashion and jetted into the 1970s alongside celebrities such as Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy. In 1974, Elton John, writing of his transatlantic travels in British Vogue, could refer to passengers on the SS France as “Gucci-Pucci” and be understood.

There followed, for two decades, enough intrigue, subterfuge, betrayal, and assassination for a Jacobean play: A series of struggles between members of the Gucci family formed the basis of the 2021 movie House of Gucci, culminating in the murder of Maurizio Gucci and the overtaking of the brand by what subsequently became Kering. Tom Ford, then unknown, was named creative director in 1994 and within a year was credited with creating the brand’s first extraordinary renaissance, moving away from bourgeois-brown fashion for a sexy, shocking new hue. A second renaissance came in 2015, with the winsomely androgynous flair of Alessandro Michele.

With Michele’s departure, in 2022, the house fell back into disorder. Revenue tumbled 21 percent in 2024; in just the first half of the following year, it fell 25 percent further. Sabato De Sarno, the creative director, parted ways with the brand in 2025, and Gucci had three CEOs over two years. Last fall, 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 the Milan Four Seasons, was immediately clear: “I know that a lot of people say Gucci is like the phoenix, going up and down and reemerging 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. “ I knew him from Balenciaga, which he had already decided to leave,” she says. She saw a fit and 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 movie, you know?” Demna tells me. “I knew Alessandro, and I knew Tom Ford from fashion TV when I was, like, 13…but to understand the brand, I had to know what Gucci stood for outside of those three things.” Over the weeks that followed, 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 on top of that, 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 Los Angeles. “On the day I finished,” Demna says, “I showed it to my husband.’” (Demna sometimes refers to Gomez as his “fashion therapist.”)

“My husband looked and 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 humor to it, 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 Los Angeles 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…. And if they don’t like it, I might as well know that 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.” When Demna presented his plan to François-Henri Pinault, the chairman of Kering, he was pelted with questions. “François-Henri wanted to be sure,” Bellettini says. “And Demna was so precise in his answers that he was like, ‘Okay, done.’ ”

In general, Demna’s creative day starts slowly—a self-protective nest of discipline which he says he learned from Marc Jacobs, for whom he worked at Louis Vuitton more than a decade ago. In Milan, he takes the morning for himself. He has coffee and a smoothie with his husband. He meditates. He cuddles his two Chihuahuas and takes them walking with Gomez. “We talk about stuff that isn’t fashion,” he says. “ I want to have this moment which is about my family, my husband, and me. And us as a couple. And our life.”

At noon, he reports for work at the office, from which point he is usually scheduled straight through to 8 p.m. He rarely takes more than a 15-minute break. “It’s intense, but I love it, because when I’m in the flow of working, I’m quite fast in making decisions,” he says. “We manage a lot for a brand this size in one day.” In the evening, he returns home and cooks dinner with Gomez—or, rather, alongside Gomez, who maintains a different diet. (“He’s gluten-free. I’m vegan,” Demna says. “Sometimes it overlaps, but”—he smiles—“­it’s hard to be gluten-free in Italy.”) In Los Angeles they go out for dinner most nights, but in Milan this “ritual,” as Demna calls it, is their life.

“We cook, we watch stand-up comedy on YouTube, listen to music,” he says. They go out for dinner once a week at most, and usually on the weekend, after walking through the city. “ I don’t really have a lot of social life in Milan,” he says.  “I’m always going to be this rebellious person, but now I live this Gucci life professionally.” His rebellion, in the Gucci way, has taken on bourgeois hues.

We are drinking ginger-lemon kombucha at a banquette table in the Campbell Bar in New York’s Grand Central Station. Demna is in the middle of a two-week stay in New York; after preparing two looks for the Met Gala, he is now preparing for his larger errand in town. In a few days’ time, Gucci will show its cruise collection in the center of Times Square, and Demna has been roaming the city for research and inspiration.

“I’ll go to vintage stores, bookstores. See some art, get some cultural impact,” he says. The process is about both gathering images as references for his collections and buying vintage pieces to use as physical canvases, “raw material” that he can cut and pin. “It’s very hard sometimes to start making a jacket from scratch,  especially when it comes to tailoring and shapes,” he explains. “I need to have material that has good details and good proportions that I can cut and Frankenstein into the shapes I want to get to.”

Shape has been extensively on Demna’s mind as he works on his September collection. After taking his deliberate process of understanding Gucci stage by stage—starting with the fundamentals of La Famiglia and progressing to the sexy Fordian club style of his first Milan show—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 recognizable 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, and signals for a second kombucha. “It’s about centimeters, 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, acting as his fashion therapist, 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 favorite 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 show. The show’s fashion concept expresses his mercantile turn. “ I call it GucciCore,” 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 peacoat. “ I was afraid to work on it, because I don’t like peacoats: 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 peacoat that he loved (“ It’s the fit, the proportions of the collar, the size and positioning of the buttons, the length”), 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 crucial to a fit. “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.

During fittings, Demna perches at a table at one end of the studio. An assistant brings him an energy bar and a bowl of nuts. A tall male model appears in a jacket, sunglasses, and flowing black pants.

“I’m not sure about this one,” Demna says. He takes off the sunglasses, then walks over to a rack of pieces, assessing alternatives, and eventually emerges on a long coat. The problem with the jacket, he explains, was that it looked somehow implausible. “That’s my big thing—to find the authenticity.”

The night of the show is clear and cool: a New York City spring caught in the hourglass of Times Square. Smoke is piped in from the street corners, giving the Midtown canyons an eerie feel. By 8:10 p.m., guests have begun to arrive on Gucci’s walled-off gray carpet. “Being at Gucci, he can dream as big as he wants, right?” Kardashian tells me. “He can say ‘I want a show in Times Square’ and pull it off.”

Demna is with Gomez in a sushi restaurant on 47th Street that has been commandeered as the show’s backstage. In one hand, he holds a Starbucks cup; in the other, a big red apple, as if in a nod to the city. The floor is marked with lineup tape for the models, and large screens near the entrance track street footage from cameras and drones. Demna draws close and peers at the footage in wonder for a moment and then, with Gomez, heads out into the cool air of the square.

Imaginary Gucci advertisements are playing across nearly 50 billboard-size screens and more than two dozen more at sidewalk level. Every celebrity arrival—from Mariah Carey in a crisp white Gucci coat to Lindsay Lohan in a black leather ensemble, Playboi Carti in shiny python trousers to EsDeeKid in a shimmering black jacket and baggy silver jeans (and his signature balaclava)—garners cheers from onlookers gathered on sidewalks and street corners. At a few minutes past nine, the screens all dim. Charlie Jones, again in the first look—this time bearing an apple in a deceptively simple black suit—traces a path through the crowd.

In the wee hours of the previous night, when Times Square was as quiet and as empty as it would ever be, the Gucci crew had assembled for their only rehearsal. Everybody wore earphones so as not to project the music, curated by Gomez, through the square. Now, with full sound and all 50 big screens tracing the runway movement with nervy panoptic attention, the effect is haunting. Suits of various power hues come down the runway. The red peacoat appears paired with black pants. There are bikers in leather, Venuses in shearling. Tom Brady swaggers in an asymmetric black jacket and matching trousers in leather. (For all the show’s diversity in age and aspect, it continues to center on slender or gym-built bodies.) When Paris Hilton appears with a black fur-like coat slung over the shoulder of a sunflower yellow Gucci-patterned summer dress with a high lavallière neck—hot, not sexy—every phone in the audience seems to lift up.

For much of his career, Demna was known for shows that built toward an unsettled climax, but the effect here is the opposite. The sequence culminates as Cindy Crawford, at 60, dressed in a high shoulder-less 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, a property with a courtyard on Madison Avenue reimagined as a center of the Gucci life across time. A jazz singer and quartet on the first floor scat-sings “It’s De-Lovely.” In a private karaoke room upstairs, guests are trying their luck at 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” The basement is a billiards lounge in red—red carpet, red curtains, red walls. A fortune teller in a hideaway reads the future by lamplight.

Demna arrives after midnight and settles into the courtyard, dense with smokers and guests taking the night air. He is surrounded by well-wishers and in an expansive mood. “ I’m relieved that this is done, because it was very complex,” he says, still clutching his Starbucks cup—as if the evening, carried by its Gucci momentum, has borne him ceaselessly along. “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; makeup, Aaron de Mey; manicurist, Raphaël Park Charles.

Fashion Photographs: Produced by Starkman & Associates.