Earlier this year, in February, Georgian designer Demna – who rose to prominence with his Paris-founded label Vetements before a decade-long tenure at Balenciaga – held his debut show for Gucci, where he was appointed creative director in March 2025. The show, which featured an eclectic cast of muses, from model Kate Moss to musician Fakemink, took place amid a monolithic, marble-clad set replete with painstaking recreations of classical statuary (spanning Roman and Hellenistic eras, and featuring figures from Aphrodite to Artemis, the original sculptures were 3D-scanned before being constructed in plaster by Tuscan artisans).
In a letter distributed before the show, he said it was a nod to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where Guccio Gucci founded the house in 1921. Travelling to the Renaissance city in a search for the ‘Gucciness of Gucci’ at the start of his tenure, Demna found himself in front of the museum’s most famous work, Sandro 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 realise how deeply the Italian Renaissance shaped everything I understand about art, about proportion, about desire, and about beauty,’ he said. ‘When I left the museum and stepped into Piazza della Signoria, the first thing I saw was Palazzo Gucci. In that moment, I understood the place Gucci holds within Italian culture.’
Gucci: The Art of Silk
Now, a new project, ‘Art of Silk’, sees Demna make his mark on perhaps Gucci’s best-known export, the silk scarf. First introduced in the 1950s, it was a decade later, in 1966, when Gucci created a custom silk scarf for Grace Kelly after her visit to the house’s flagship store in Milan, that the accessory would become an emblem of Italian style (by that point, Kelly had been the Princess of Monaco for ten years, after her 1956 marriage to Prince Rainier III). It was adorned with the ‘Flora’ print, a design by illustrator Vittorio Accornero created specially for Kelly, featuring 43 different flowers, botanicals, and insects, and 37 different colours (an impressive feat, considering each colour required a separate screen to be printed). Accornero had drawn inspiration from another Botticelli masterpiece, Primavera (Allegory of Spring), which depicts the nymph Chloris transforming into the goddess of spring, Flora (like Birth of Venus, it is also housed in the Uffizi Gallery).
Indeed, interpretations of the Flora motif feature on two of the ten silk scarves in the ‘Art of Silk’ collection, alongside eight other designs drawn from the house’s archive (as well as the floral and botanic designs, there are also nautical, animal and equestrian motifs). The two Flora scarves were created exclusively for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the opening of the Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries this month. Also in Los Angeles, in the house’s Rodeo Drive store, a collaboration with the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Firenze sees students reproduce the ten designs as artworks to decorate the space.
The Flora scarves, which will be available in limited-edition numbers, also feature a collaboration with Nido di Seta, a Calabrian agricultural collective, and Ongetta, a producer of silk yarns, who are working together to revive Italy’s silk supply chain (once thriving, it has significantly reduced production in recent decades). The project is centred on the production of mulberries – mulberry silk is made by feeding silk worms white mulberry leaves – using once-abandoned land and renewable energy. Gucci says these Flora scarves ‘embody a true rebirth of Italian silk production’ (they will be available exclusively at the LACMA Store and the Gucci Beverly Hills flagship).
The accompanying ‘Art of Silk’ campaign, meanwhile, sees the styles worn in various ways, including as handkerchief tops, belts, and headbands (‘[the campaign] explores the silk scarf as a dynamic element of personal expression, presenting multiple ways of wearing it’, says Demna via the collection notes). It is the second Art of Silk campaign since the project’s launch in 2025: in April of last year, the house drafted nine artists to reinterpret the 90 x 90 silk scarf, captured on actress Julia Garner in a campaign by Steven Meisel.
Shop the story
