While walking the sunny streets of Brera, Milan’s design district, over the past few days, I kept noticing the same series of images wherever I turned. (Well, when I could glimpse them between the throngs of people with fold-out maps tucked under their arms, checking off the seemingly endless array of exhibitions that had sprung up across the neighborhood.) On billboards everywhere were images of Demna’s first handbag campaign for Gucci, featuring Kate Moss and Emily Ratajkowski posing in underwear with just a bag to protect their modesty or wearing knee-high GG-monogrammed boots, staring out through raccoon-like kohl-rimmed eyes.
Just over a year after he was appointed artistic director at Gucci, Demna’s vision for the Florentine fashion house has (finally) been fully realized. Plenty of column inches have already been dedicated to unpacking his debut runway show, with its monumental set of 3D-scanned replicas of ancient Roman statues from the Uffizi, and the motley casting that nodded to Gucci-heads past and present: ’90s footballers, late-night-turned-early-morning party girls, Gen Z bedroom rappers. (And, of course, all those eye-popping mini skirts and muscle tees.)
But there’s no need to relitigate that here. What I will say is that, seeing the adverts in the context of a balmy spring afternoon in Milan, Demna’s vision felt altogether less shocking. I attempted to take a (highly unscientific, admittedly) survey of the people I spotted wearing Gucci, and those wearing heavily logoed looks in general—and many of them could have walked straight off Demna’s Gucci runway and onto Via Brera. In Milan at least, logomania is alive and well. Which was sort of Demna’s point.
Photo: Courtesy of Gucci
Though it could well have been that some of those Gucci-clad city slickers on the Monday evening of Milan Design Week were headed to the Chiostro di San Simpliciano, tucked away on a piazza behind the Corso Garibaldi. There, at the center of a cloister in this former convent, an enormous jet black pavilion had landed like one of the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Within it, a flamboyantly dressed crowd was placing tickets with QR codes into a vending machine. The tickets prompted one of four canned cocktails, inspired by the archetypes that filled his debut lookbook “La Famiglia,” to fall with a thunk into a tray: a Drama Queen, Fashion Icon, Mega Pesantone, or Super Incazzata. (The latter two translate roughly as a tedious bore, and a vulgar term for an angry woman, respectively.) I was flattered to receive a Fashion Icon: a concoction of mint-infused tequila, passion fruit cordial, and fresh lemon juice, that came in a bright pink can with a garish logo that recalled a sugary fruit soda.
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