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MILAN – “I feel very Gucci. I feel excited. I feel like we’re having a lot of fun. There is a lot of fun in the process.” So said Demna ahead of his first runway show for Gucci on Friday, frequently flashing big smiles during a preview appointment at the brand’s showroom.
His extensive research into the brand, immersing himself into “understanding the Gucciness of Gucci” over the past few months, after the first “La Famiglia” series of characters unveiled in September and his pre-fall collection, have led to his vision as artistic director of Gucci.
“It’s not a tribute to the heritage, it’s not based on everything that I’ve learned so far, which was a lot, by the way,” he said. “This is my proposition of what Gucci will become.”
He explained that he felt the need to write a letter, posted today on social media, to trace his journey. He cited Italian craftsmanship, as well as Gucci’s daring innovation, but most of all, he realized how the brand represents Italian culture.
“Gucci is not a ‘maison,’ it does not have couture roots, it’s not based on a myth. Gucci is a superbrand that is as much about pragmatic product as it is about emotion. Gucci is dream, passion, excess, contradiction, love and hate, triumph and collapse, pride and vulnerability, perseverance, chaos, genius,” he says in the letter. “Everything you could say about a human being you can say about Gucci. I see Gucci as a person. Someone with a wild, unforgettable past and unmistakable codes. Someone fully aware of who they are, yet restless, curious, hungry to evolve, to surprise, to be surprised, to challenge and to be challenged, to be respected, to be desired.”
During the interview, Demna opened up about a trip to Florence in November, citing for example Gucci’s industrial complex ArtLab and marveling not only at the artisans and their craft but also at its technology, “its chemical testing laboratory with scientists,” or at the robots “running all day with bags to see how they react.” However, it was a visit to the Uffizi museum that most struck a chord, and in particular Sandro Botticelli’s “La Primavera [Spring]” painting, especially linked to Gucci because it inspired Vittorio Accornero to design the brand’s signature Flora motif, and also Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”
“Standing in front of it I felt overwhelmed. The beauty in it was unconditional, it was absolute. It made me realize how deeply the Italian Renaissance shaped everything I understand about art, about proportion, about desire and about beauty,” Demna writes.
At Gucci’s showroom, he further elaborated saying that “it looked like it was painted yesterday. I couldn’t move, it almost felt like a revelation, I realized how important art is for me, actually emotionally, because it really does trigger your feelings. It’s amazing, I feel like there are so few things that today trigger this kind of emotion in me [except for] art, music, personal relationships.”
Exiting the Uffizi and stepping onto Piazza della Signoria, he saw Palazzo Gucci and “in that instant, I understood the place Gucci holds within Italian culture. It has become clear to me what my mission here really is. Above the product, Gucci is culture, it is a way of thinking and a way of being. Gucci needs to become a feeling. Gucci must become an adjective.”
During the interview, he said that was an “aha moment,” and that he realized “how Italian Renaissance actually influenced everything that I know. Art history was one of was my favorite subjects when I was in art college. Gucci is part of the Italian culture, as Botticelli, Michelangelo, Nutella, Ferrari, but also it’s part of the global culture.”
The set design of the fall show was changed after that momentous trip, which gave Demna “a bigger picture of what my mission here is, a bigger understanding. I’m a designer. I love product. And, of course, coming here, I want Gucci products to have an identity, to have refinement, to have quality, to have all of that, to be innovative. But there, I realized that my job is more than that. In a way, it’s more about putting Gucci into the into the spotlight of a culture. Bringing the cultural relevance is a big part of my job here, because I think Gucci is a kind of brand that only succeeds when it has the cultural relevance, because it’s part of culture. You cannot just put that aside and make nice bags. That’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough,” he argued.
Relevance and culture can’t only be based on the past, he continued, and his aim is to build Gucci’s current relevance, and posting the letter before the show is a way to offer his vision not only to the press but to the general public. “I think it’s really important,” he affirmed.
He underscored that he wrote the letter without the help of AI and that he has returned to writing for himself and for the teams, citing another letter for all Gucci employees issued at the end of last year, “ to give them a little bit of my vision, of what I want. You know, a lot of people have been here for many years, so I wanted them to say ‘Let’s [do this] together’.”
Demna did not divulge many details on the fall collection, as he wishes to “spare you a technical manifesto about the construction and technicality” of it, he writes, but he did add that it should become “lighter, softer, more refined, more elaborate, more emotional, even senseless sometimes. I don’t want it to be intellectual, but I want Gucci to be a feeling.”
Aiming to have heritage and fashion coexist, he said “I’m not sure if there is another brand on this scale that has such a strong heritage but cannot exist without fashion. You know, there are brands that can just exist on heritage but here it just doesn’t work this way. It needs fashion. Gucci is like a Ferrari, or some kind of crazy sports car that has an amazing engine, that needs fuel. If there is no fashion, there is no fuel in that [Gucci] engine. It won’t move. It’s a beautiful car with a great engine. But fashion, what fuels the heritage, the craftsmanship, everything that is in the past, the grandiose machinery that Gucci is, strangely needs that,” he said.
“It’s paradise to work at Gucci,” he concluded, enthusing about setting up the atelier at the brand’s headquarters in Milan, and the industrial machinery behind the company “that I actually never had in my life.”
He also said that he is in a stage of his career where he can “really build my vision from scratch, not having to reference Gucci or what would Tom [Ford] think, or Alessandro [Michele] because all of them, all of the creative directors that have been here, they’ve built their own chapter, in a way, independent from the past, but based on that past. What I want to do is to really define what the modern luxury product at Gucci means and I try to do everything lighter and lighter and lighter. This is like a mantra. I feel the luxury fashion industry has become very heavy, very rigid, because rigidity gives this idea of durability, somehow to consumers but in a very old way, a very old mindset. We talk about comfort, but there is no comfort when it’s heavy. And I think the other word is desirability. I want to make product that people want to have regardless. I call it the product FOMO. You don’t really need it but when you see it, you’re like, I need to have it. Because a lot of brands today in industry overlap. We need to ignite desire or this industry is going to just vanish.
”This desire is not a given and sometimes it happens on its own. You cannot really intellectualize it, “ he continued. “I need to tell you that there is a big shift for me as a designer, being here from like, a year ago, or when I was in Paris for the last 12 years, I tried to mostly impress myself. Look at this, I’m so intellectual. It’s my concept. I realized it recently, that I was trying to convince myself that I was a smart, smart designer, everything was intellectualized, because of my past, my childhood, my family, and, at Gucci, I don’t do that kind of at all in my process. I’m sitting in the fitting room, I don’t think about, is it smart enough? I am now thinking about, first of all, the experience of the product that I’m working on. And also like, what kind of feeling does it give me? It’s much more emotional for me. I have a very good instinct in general, but sometimes it’s hard to use your instinct when you overthink. I feel freer now.”
