Demna’s debut runway show for Gucci, held in February, took place amid a monolithic, marble-clad ‘museum’ inspired by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and constructed from scratch in Milan’s Palazzo delle Scintille. Lined with recreations of Roman and Hellenistic statuary, Demna said he wanted to reassert the place that Gucci holds within Italian culture – as much a part of the country’s character as the masterworks inside the Uffizi (the gallery occupies the same piazza as Palazzo Gucci, the spiritual home of the brand, which was founded in the Tuscan city in 1921).
The realisation had come while viewing Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus – a work that Demna had encountered endlessly (it is one of the most replicated pieces of art in history), yet never viewed in real life. ‘Standing in front of it, I felt overwhelmed,’ he wrote. ‘The beauty in it was unconditional; it was absolute. 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.’
This afternoon in Milan (25 September 2026), Demna held his second runway show for Gucci, staged in a simulacrum of a Gucci store meticulously constructed within the Allianz Mi-Co events space. It was designed to resemble Demna’s new ‘store concept’ for the house, which will begin with a renovated Paris store that opens in late October on Avenue Montaigne (further stores around the world will follow).
Within it, nods to ancient antiquity – stone frescoes, recreations of classical statues, sets of urns – recalled his debut’s showspace; elsewhere, planes of marble, velvet banquettes and high-pile carpets signalled Gucci’s association with luxury. The designer said he wanted it to have ‘monumental’ quality – a return to the days when the Gucci store was a true temple of desire (in the late 1970s, high-spending consumers at New York and Los Angeles stores were given a golden key to access the exclusive Gucci Galleria).
‘My first year at Gucci was dedicated to understanding and formulating what Gucci stands for,’ Demna wrote in a letter to guests. ‘The conclusion of my research is that Gucci stands for being rooted in the desire to belong to a more glamorous world, and in the audacity to remake that world in your own image.’
The show that followed saw models traverse the show space as if haughtily shopping for handbags or shoes (indeed, real product from recent collections hung around the ‘store’). ‘Gucci is about luxury that wants to be seen – it is about the tension between propriety and sensuality,’ he said. ‘The house begins with polished bourgeois respectability, but its most memorable periods introduce eccentricity, danger or sex appeal into that respectable world.’
As has become his signature – at both Gucci and Balenciaga, where he was creative director previously – the collection began with archetypes, among them ‘The Rebellious Aristocrat’, ‘The Snob’ and ‘The Eccentric’, which were here conjured by a cast which included Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Poppy Delevingne and Alex Consani. Bourgeois ‘fur’ coats and sinuous sparkling gowns met body-contouring riffs on equestrian attire, louche double-breasted tailoring and overcoats, as well as elements of prep: layered polos, tucked-in ties and sweaters worn over the shoulder all featured. Elsewhere, the horse bit became a recurring motif, whether miniature on the collar of a shirt or the pocket of a leather jacket, or supersized as a fastening on the back of a jacket or slung around the waist.
‘It kind of feels like it’s my first show for Gucci,’ he said backstage after the show, which he described as ‘broken bourgeoisie’ – a departure, he said, from his ‘comfort zone’. ‘I cannot base my whole vision on the 1990s – [on] snobby fashion glamour,’ he continued. ‘But you think about Gucci before fashion, before Tom [Ford], this is how it was, it was all about this claimed bourgeoisie. It’s quintessentially Gucci.’
Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more from Milan Fashion Week S/S 2027.
