By Aaron Kok - published
What makes a Gucci person a Gucci person?
That’s the question Demna chose to answer in his debut for Gucci’s spring/summer 2026. Here was a collection less concerned with shock value and more preoccupied with archetypes, identity, and the long shadow cast by a House with almost mythic cultural weight. This wasn’t so much a demolition job as it was an excavation into the history and essence of Gucci.
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On a clandestine Monday afternoon, two days before Gucci was slated to present Demna’s vision in Milan, an email arrived in the inboxes of fashion insiders around the world that sent the BAZAAR office into a flurry. In it were first-look photos from the collection; a first look at what the new era of Gucci would look like. Demna, never one to traffic in subtlety, titled the collection “La Famiglia”—a loaded phrase if there ever was one. Equal parts mafia-adjacent, matriarchal, and memetic, the word becomes shorthand here for the cast of characters that make up the new Gucci-verse. It’s a kind of extended cinematic universe, only instead of superheroes and aliens, we got aperitivo girls, glam Italian sciuras, femme fatales, and one L’Influencer.
In place of a conventional collection, Demna offered a psychological wardrobe. Each look—presented within an ornate photo frame—felt like an anthropological study in style: who wears what, and why.
The opening look—a swingy peacoat in lipstick red, festooned with brooches and topped with a silk scarf around the model’s head—could have been the uniform for an ultra-glam lady on her way to lunch with the girls in Tuscany. Moments later, a look titled “Figo” (which means ‘cool’ in Italian) is showcased on a model baring his hewn abs in a leather biker jacket and jeans slung so low they sat precariously on his pelvic bones: an obvious nod to the sexed-up era of Gucci under Tom Ford’s helm. Then, a powdery grey robe dress arrived and covered in a flurry of plumes, styled with sandals: a Demna-fied rendition of his predecessor Alessandro Michele’s love for the dramatic, and which Demna named the look as “La Drama Queen”.
The through-line within wasn’t obvious, but it was deliberate. Gucci has always dealt in contradictions, and Demna leaned into that legacy by splintering the collection across personas. Accessories, always a bellwether for Gucci’s commercial soul, were reintroduced with narrative intent. The Bamboo 1947 bag returned with a refreshed treatment—more angular and suppler to the touch, with a burnished hardware finish that leaned cooler rather than staid. The Horsebit loafer, first made in 1953, came refreshed with an elongated, boxier silhouette.
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Elsewhere, the GG Monogram and the Flora print appeared in ways both reverent and ironic: covering a trench, stamped onto a leather zip-up, and splashed across a headscarf worn by La VIP, a look evoking both old-world patron and new-world gutsiness.
But it wasn’t all homage. There was a new vocabulary being formed too—one built on the bones of Demna’s own oeuvre. You saw it in the proportion play of a mutton sleeve with slim-tailored lines. You saw it in the casting, where models carried themselves like characters rather than clothes hangers. You saw it, most pointedly, in the embrace of fashion’s current cultural moment: a retreat from irony and a return to intention. Dressing not to mock, but to mark.
What was particularly successful was the way Demna blurred gender, genre, and geography. A furry opera coat brushed against a sheer bodycon dress that hinted at vintage Italian glam. Sleek knits were paired with jewellery like relics of mid-century Roman cinema. Two male models wore nothing but monochromatic swimming trunks, a callback to the dolce vita days spent riding your Vespa up and down the coast, while another appeared in a fully sequined minidress that shimmered under the lights like a disco ball in a dark Milanese dance club. There were nods to sprezzatura, that famously Italian art of studied nonchalance—seen in the slouch of a trench or the step-in ease of a soft leather mule.
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But perhaps most compelling was Demna’s refusal to flatten Gucci into a single identity. Instead, he exploded it into many. Each look was treated like a portrait, a frame from a film that never existed but might be lurking in someone’s dreams.
Critics may look for drama or revolution in a debut, but what Demna offered was depth. He didn’t so much reinvent Gucci as he recontextualised it, rendering it not as a brand with a fixed aesthetic, but as a name full of histories, contradictions, and evolving desires. He honoured the House’s past—reprising icons like the Flora motif, now rendered in a nocturnal colourway—but made room for new codes too. The clothes were always alive. “La Famiglia is a study of the ‘Gucciness’ of Gucci,” the show notes read. It was also a reminder that fashion, at its best, is a mirror. And sometimes, the reflection shows you not who you are, but who you might be.