At Gucci, Demna Gave Us Sex, Power, Pop Culture—and a Supermodel in a G-String

Jason Sargent Saturday, February 28, 2026

Brooke BobbSat, February 28, 2026 at 3:59 PM UTC

At Gucci, Demna Gave Us Sex, Power, and Pop launchmetrics

Three security guards were helping a woman down the steps inside Gucci’s Fall 2026 show space—a museum-style hall inside one of Milan’s biggest event spaces dotted with exact replicas of the Roman statues inside Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. She was decked out in Gucci: dangerously high Gucci logo-covered platforms, a floor-length Gucci logo-covered caftan cape lined with feathers, and giant bedazzled Gucci sunglasses, her hair in big blow-dried curls that seemed to further obstruct her view. One misstep and she’d be a Gucci-clad casualty.

She made it to her seat, eventually. So did Paris and Nicky Hilton, who were seated next to the house’s former creative director Alessandro Michele and Donatella Versace. Next to them was Romeo Beckham, rapper EsDeeKid (wearing a face mask and carrying a giant Gucci duffle bag), and Demi Moore in a catsuit with her purse pup Pilaf in tow, all assembled to witness Demna’s runway debut as creative director of the 103-year-old Italian fashion house. It was by all accounts a wackadoo front row, one that telegraphed an unmistakable reality of this new Gucci era—we are so back in Demnaland.

For ten years at Balenciaga and before that at Vetements, Demna radically challenged the luxury fashion business and our collective relationship to taste. He disrupted notions of what should or could be considered rich, tasteful, and beautiful. He brought underground culture to the highest echelons of the fashion business. In one show, he made a statement about global warming and wartime displacement while also inviting Kim Kardashian to sit front row wearing a dress he designed using yellow caution tape. He took Cristóbal Balenciaga’s definitive cocoon silhouette and added it to things like anoraks and leather jackets, selling them alongside ridiculously thick-soled sneakers that looked three sizes too big on all the rich club kids who bought them up like candy. Demna, self-admittingly, has always led his design vernacular with an intellectual bent, one that was clever but also deeply in tune with pop culture and always forward-thinking. He started it at Vetements, crystallized it at Balenciaga, and now at Gucci he’s really feeling himself, right alongside those big ideas.

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That was essentially what Demna told the models who walked the show: to feel themselves, project the most exaggerated parts of their personalities, and be confident. You’d have to be to pull off some of the opening looks: a series of searingly hot, tight mini dresses and skirt suits worn with precariously high stilettos, the models carrying totes in the crooks of their arms.

In the spirit of what Tom Ford did during his tenure at Gucci, sex was front and center. Demna showed little baby tees with leggings, leather bumsters with naughty little leather jackets. Musclehead models walked the show in shirts so tight they looked molded to their pecs. We got a glimpse of Kate Moss’s derriere as she closed the show in a slinky black sequin gown with her G-logoed thong revealed at the open back. Emily Ratajkowski and Gabriette sauntered down the runway in crystal and black lace mini dresses. Vivian Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon Musk and a rising modeling star, was clad in a clingy white dress with a revealing slit up the side. She looked fabulous.

Outside of the hypersexy clothes that called Ford to mind, Demna did offer a few more traditional Gucci pieces for those not looking to express their self-assurance with a thong or a pair of skintight pants. There were cool cropped bomber jackets with thick fur collars, classic peacoats, and a trench, along with long, flowy neon floral print dresses. In a way, Demna captured all of the divergent Gucci archetypes—the glamorous Milanese matriarch who still has her original Jackie bag and Flora scarf, the Tom Ford-era–obsessed nostalgiahead with the “G” pubic hair ad on their mood board, and the Alessandro-era eccentric who dresses somewhere in between (she wears jeans and a weird shoe with her peacoat, the Gucci horsebit somewhere on her person, and a little fur on her loafer).

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“I hope you feel Gucci,” Demna said to a crowd of reporters backstage just after the show. But what does it mean to feel Gucci? And what, exactly, is Gucci? In his show, as in the house’s history, it’s a lot of different things—all those archetypes fluctuating in and out of the zeitgeist over the years. Unlike Balenciaga or Dior or Chanel, Gucci isn’t widely identifiable by a specific silhouette, at least not to the general public. A print? Yes. Bags and shoes? For sure. A logo? Absolutely. But when you ask different people how they see Gucci, you almost always get a different answer.

“I want to put Gucci back in the spotlight of what culture is,” Demna said. “Cultural relevancy.” Say what you will of Demna’s approach this season to “designing closer to the body,” as he noted, or his notion of wanting to feel “attractive” and “seductive,” but he certainly hit a nerve. That’s what he does best, but he doesn’t provoke for the sake of provoking. What Demna is about is digging into the way we are all living, dressing, consuming. In a world where looksmaxxing and AI are king and the rich are getting richer, Gucci is giving them what they want. But he’s also here for the people who don’t want to just feel Gucci, but also feel themselves—even if it’s an exaggerated version. Under Demna’s reign, Gucci is more than a heritage luxury fashion house. It’s whatever the hell you want it to be. Just watch your step in those heels.

Photo credit: LAUNCHMETRICS SPOTLIGHT

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