I swear I watched this show several times, because I wanted to understand where Demna wanted to take Gucci. In the end I found a key, and it is very clear: exasperation. Everything is pushed to the limit – proportions, volumes, the body, the very way an image is built. Knitwear becomes enormous and is worn by very thin boys; jackets either widen until they deform the figure or become tight, dry, almost constricting. In menswear especially, the body seems constantly corrected, shifted, diminished, as if the silhouette had to lose its balance in order to gain an identity.
And this is exactly where my problem with this collection begins. Because to exasperate means to bring something to a maximum level of tension, and after tension there necessarily comes a breaking point. Here, instead, I have the feeling that this tension has become the very language of the house, a grammar made of excess, deformation, citation, provocation, archive and constant contrasts, without it ever becoming fully clear what the point of arrival is.
Gucci comes from a different culture. It comes from precision, from construction, from an almost obsessive attention to detail, from leather, from accessories, from the ability to make a jacket, a bag or a shoe desirable without necessarily turning them into a statement. Demna takes this heritage and forces it, stretches it, shifts it, brings it into his own world. His signature is visible, very much so. But precisely because it is so visible, the question becomes inevitable: how much of Gucci remains, and how much are we simply watching Demna applied to Gucci?
In menswear the doubt is even stronger. I see a very young male figure, built almost on a single type of physique and attitude. Targeting that audience is fine – it would be absurd to deny it – but Gucci does not sell only to twenty-year-olds. It also sells to men of forty, fifty, sixty, to a client who may want to be contemporary without turning into a character. And here I struggle to understand where that man has gone.
Then comes the “family”: the boy, the girlfriend, the mother, the aunt, the older lady. I fully understand the desire to tell the story of a transversal brand, capable of crossing generations, but I keep asking myself what the story really is. Because if the common thread is simply taking different eras, different codes, archive pieces, Nineties sensuality, Seventies elements, Eighties volumes and putting them back together by deforming them, then we are not looking at a new vision: we are looking at a continuous reworking of what we have already seen.
I remain puzzled by the womenswear too. Sensuality is part of Gucci’s history and no one questions it, but there is sexy and sexy. There is a sensuality built on proportion, on cut, on a body that is suggested, and there is another that constantly needs to show itself. Here the second path is often chosen. It is a precise choice, but it does not always become elegance, at least not for me.
And so I return to the question I have been asking myself for some time: what are they trying to do with Gucci? Because this is not a small independent label that can afford to turn every collection into an act of protest or a conceptual exercise. This is Gucci. It is a global brand, with a history, a market, clients, investors and an evident problem of desirability to rebuild.
Destroying everything to see what happens next can also be a creative strategy. In fashion it has happened many times, and sometimes it has worked. But destruction alone is not a project. At some point you also have to build something the public wants to desire, wear, buy and recognize as new.
GALLERY
