Gucci Says Bourgeois Is An Attitude
Demna pushed himself outside his comfort zone to present his most complete vision for the brand yet
LAUNCHMETRICS SPOTLIGHT
This afternoon, Demna took us to a glossy Gucci store, except it wasn’t really a Gucci store at all. The brand created a “vision for the future Gucci retail space” to backdrop its Spring 2027 presentation. It was cavernous. They sectioned the space off into various high-ceilinged rooms, each offering its own mix of ready-to-wear, handbags, accessories, and shoes, placed on shelves, hung on racks, and displayed beneath glass cases. Outside glass doors, passersby milled about, peeking in the windows and ducking beneath their Gucci bags amidst a faux rainstorm.
The feel of a luxury store is tinged with exclusivity. These days, you practically need a golden ticket to enter—and a golden Amex to purchase something. Demna was fascinated with Gucci’s bourgeois history, but in this case, it’s not as simple as the haves and have-nots. Rather than toy with inherent poshness, he examined two modes of relating to the upper classes: both the outsider’s fervent desire to belong and the insider’s need to rebel.
The codes of bourgeois dressing are, as he said backstage, slightly outside his comfort zone, but what a playground for someone like Demna, who loves to place a harsh mirror in the face of the luxury industry. “Bourgeoisie is an attitude and Gucci kind of gave me permission to corrupt it in my own way,” he explained. “The rebellious aristocrat became my base on which I realized I want to build my vision for this brand.”
The lineup was split into two shows: a full menswear offering followed by the same for womenswear. His women’s looks began with equestrian-inspired ensembles: skintight jodhpur pants, shirts with upturned collars, and riding boots—plus a needle-thin stiletto heel. The collection progressed into country-club style shirtdresses and trench coats, worn by older models who added a certain je ne sais quoi with their oversized sunglasses and jangling gold jewelry. Then came the tailoring, which Demna had sucked the volume out of. Models wore razor-sharp black suiting with dramatic collars, “pagoda” shoulders—constructed without pads for lightness—and ultra-narrow trousers, capris, and pencil skirts.
launchmetrics.com/spotlight//LAUNCHMETRICS SPOTLIGHT
After that, Demna really started to sink into his vibe, presenting a new, winning outfit formula for the upcoming season. A series of looks paired variations of rugby shirts, pleated tartan skirts, and puff-shaped bomber jackets with “3X” belts hung with oversized horsebits and heaps of jewelry piled onto necklines. As Demna mused, it’s what a blue-blooded child of an aristocrat might wear to the private school that she hates. (This style of maximalism is also outside Demna’s wheelhouse; he often gravitates toward cleaner lines styled in a more reductive fashion.)
The evening wear rotation, worn by supermodels including Alex Consani, Anok Yai, Candice Swanepoel, and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, featured “very sexy, very glamorous, quintessentially Gucci pieces that look simple, but there is a lot of construction work around them.” The finale look, he says, embodies this idea thoroughly. And it’s the one he’s most proud of. The dress looks like a swath of pinky-beige fabric barely clinging to the model’s body, draped just so over one shoulder, with a silver drop-like bead weighing it down at the model’s back—a feat of gravity.
LAUNCHMETRICS SPOTLIGHT
Backstage, Demna regaled journalists on the different aspects of the brand he’s leaned into for his collections. In his film The Tiger, which featured his smaller debut collection, he played with the vibrant personalities of Gucci’s past, embracing the caricature aspect of the brand’s legacy. He’s also experimented with sex appeal, seen explicitly in the bodycon silhouettes of the Fall 2026 collection. And in New York for the presentation of Resort 2027, he thought more comprehensively about a Gucci “wardrobe,” fleshing out the lifestyle-oriented necessities that that entails.
Like a high-fashion Goldielocks, he’s tried all of those ideas on for size. Now, he’s somewhere in the middle. In a letter written about this show, he declared that the current collection is his “complete personal vision for the brand.” And it seems to fit just right.
Gucci Spring Summer 2027
Originally published by harpersbazaar.com. Syndicated material does not necessarily reflect the views of Vogue British.
