Demna Debuts First Gucci Runway in Milan as Kering Seeks Turnaround

Demna Gvasalia’s first full runway as Gucci creative director was staged in Milan’s Palazzo delle Scintille as a high-stakes attempt to supply the creative spark Francesca Bellettini argues restores performance. Gucci, which made more than €10 billion in 2022 and about €6 billion in 2025, accounts for roughly 40 percent of Kering’s sales, and the show arrived framed as a strategic move in a wider turnaround.

The set was literal about heritage. The darkened hall was populated with replicas of Uffizi statues and a spotlighted runway that recalled Tom Ford’s famous 1995 technique, a reference commentators explicitly drew. Demna dubbed the collection Gucci Primavera and used an Instagram letter to map his emotional itinerary through the Italian Renaissance, writing that standing before Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus left him “overwhelmed” and convinced of Gucci’s cultural place when he stepped into Piazza della Signoria and saw Palazzo Gucci.

Clothes translated that archive reverence into a body-first wardrobe. The collection mixed body-skimming separates - legging-style trousers and seamless, skin-tight silhouettes - with skintight black slacks, thin logo belts, and sheer white minidresses executed in hosiery fabric. Male models wore white t-shirts “slipping off their bodies,” and a series of tight garments revealed pecs, nips, hip bones and thighs, aligning with W Magazine’s shorthand of “skinny and sexy” clothing that reads both hedonistic and product-focused.

The runway read as spectacle as well as commerce. Kate Moss closed the show in a glittering maxidress with cutouts and a whale-tale thong, while Emily Ratajkowski, Karlie Kloss, Mariacarla Boscono, Gabriette and Alex Consani all appeared in the cast. Emerging musicians Nettspend and Fakemink also walked, and Demna’s own Instagram noted the moment was “full of stars, both on and off the” runway, a fragment that underscored the celebrity-weighted staging captured in Getty images by Daniele Venturelli.

Demna made the stakes personal in his notes and backstage. “For 10 years, I tried to impress, and I tried to impress myself. Show that I was a smart designer. At Gucci, I got this sudden rush of emotion. I realized I can create from an emotional space - fashion that triggers emotion and feelings. Either you love it or hate it,” he told Vogue backstage. His show notes framed Gucci as “a superbrand that is as much about pragmatic product as it is about emotion,” adding that “everything you could say about a human being you can say about Gucci. I see Gucci as a person.”

Industry voices immediately saw the debut as a deliberate pivot. Samuel Hine compared the moment to Tom Ford’s 1995 reinvention, saying “People go where the energy is” and noting the clothes were “skinny and sexy” with an intense runway attitude. Rickie de Sole of Nordstrom emphasized “strong nods to Tom Ford-era Gucci by way of the 2000s” and predicted the image of Kate Moss closing would have a lasting impact.

The collection closed as both a creative manifesto and a clear commercial playbook: product-forward pieces built from a recognizable Gucci grammar. With Gucci’s sales down from over €10 billion to around €6 billion in three years, this “foundation that begins my story at Gucci” is explicitly designed to convert runway drama into the kind of sales lift Francesca Bellettini says comes when creative vision is lit.