This is not the entrance of a new designer. It is the grafting of a new grammar of thought. Demna’s arrival at the creative helm of Gucci does not simply represent an aesthetic turning point, but marks a phase transition: fashion no longer seeks only imaginaries, but tools to understand the complexity of the present. What does it mean to entrust the genetic code of one of the most powerful maisons in the global system to an author who has made the short circuit between luxury and trauma, between excess and subtraction, his operative territory?
Demna is not a choice of rupture. He is a choice of complexity. An act of strategic intelligence, bringing Gucci into a new linguistic dimension. His work does not ask for consensus. It asks for position. Those who wanted Demna — and here we must recognize the precise and refined intelligence of Francesca Bellettini, Deputy CEO of Kering, and Stefano Cantino, new CEO of Gucci — understood that what is at stake today is not only the form of the product, but the form of thought. No longer the object of desire, but its deconstruction. Not the narrative, but its apparatus.
Demna has always been the author closest to contemporary art among the great fashion designers.
His shows are not simple presentations, but environmental and psychic installations, conceived as performances on the very status of identity. From the artificial snow of eco-apocalypse to runways immersed in mud, to empty, white, silent scenographies where the body dematerializes, Demna constructs scenarios positioned between digital dystopia and conceptual theater. He has collaborated with figures like Sissel Tolaas, an olfactory artist with whom he has built disturbing and immersive scent-based environments, and with Eliza Douglas, performer and visual alter ego of his aesthetic. His shows are often soundtracked by Aphex Twin, and traversed by noise atmospheres, hyperrealistic, visually disturbing. The imagery feeds on the work of photographers like David Sims, Roe Ethridge and Katerina Jebb, but also on the graphic atmospheres of Subliminal Projects. Every element is part of a curatorial, intermedial, expanded construction.
His aesthetic vocabulary is post-traumatic, post-social, post-ironic. But it is above all profoundly visual and theoretical. And this sensibility, grafted into Gucci’s fluid DNA, can become explosive. Because Gucci has always been a contaminable brand, permeable, capable of mutation. Demna is not the “anti-luxury” designer as he has often been described. He is, if anything, the new luxury itself, rewritten as critical and affective language. A luxury that does not console, but exposes. That does not idealize, but observes.That does not sell dreams, but dislocated realities.
“My job is not to make you dream. It’s to make you see,” he has said. It is a program. And it is a challenge. Gucci, after all, is the perfect place for this operation. A protean, unstable brand, historically capable of traversing crises and rebirths, from one vision to another. And now — perhaps for the first time — ready not to represent desire, but to rewrite it.
What awaits us is not an immediate revolution, but a progressive destructuring of the image. A recomposition of the dressed body as critical space. A luxury that becomes thought and no longer just promise.
Demna does not enter Gucci to dress. He enters to dismantle and reassemble. To build a new architecture of meaning.
Every cut, every material, every gesture will speak another language. And it will be a sharp, stratified, intimate language.
His arrival is a cultural operation, not just a creative one. An investment in thought, in tension, in depth. Gucci, today, no longer settles for being a sign. It wants to return to being an apparatus of vision.
And this, in the confused landscape of contemporary fashion, is already a revolutionary act.
