MILAN — “At the beginning I was, like, I will do a mini collection. We will just release it digitally. I mean, a lot of people thought it would be a show. I needed to explain that it’s not my vision yet, it’s Gucci so far, as seen by me. It’s a different thing.”
Demna was having a reflective moment on Tuesday afternoon about the “different thing” he was unleashing on the world as his first public engagement with Gucci. First, “La Famiglia,” an album of framed portraits of 35 Gucci-clad archetypes, was released online in lookbook form on Monday. Then, on Tuesday night, “The Tiger,” a 16-minute film by directors Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn depicting a very different kind of family with Demi Moore as a glamorously dysfunctional matriarch, had a Hollywood-style premiere at the Palazzo Mezzanotte, Milan’s Stock Exchange, which had been artfully reconfigured by Demna’s longtime set wizard Niklas Bildstein as a huge cinema for the occasion.
Both gorgeous, head-scratching ploys rocketed Gucci back into the fashion conversation. Given the brand’s financial woes, the logical assumption might have been that Kering would want to play their Demna card as soon as possible with a huge big reassuring show that would reverse Gucci’s trajectory. After all, the label has history with epoch-making debuts that turned on a dime. But, once again, Demna revealed himself as a fashion savant. First, he wanted to close out his decade at Balenciaga with one last couture show in July. “I told Kering I cannot do a [Gucci] show this year because I need a kind of transition. I can’t do a show in parallel, or make a show in two months. And they were, like, ‘We need something in here, it’s ok that you do your first show in February, but the stores need product.’ So I was, like, ‘Let me find something like a compromise that can work without being a show, without being a full-blown collection.’ And then I went to the archives.” And that’s where this week’s double whammy was born.
“There are so many amazing pieces,” he rhapsodises at the memory. “Not only bags, but also I discovered Tom Ford as a designer. I loved him as an imagemaker and what he brought to fashion, but I didn’t know the Speedo with the ties [Bastardo in La Famiglia’s line-up]. This is the most genius. I was jealous. I almost had FOMO that I didn’t come up with that. So I was taking things like that, and I was trying to buy things online, especially Tom Ford and 70s Gucci, which is very hard to find, and suddenly, I was, like, why don’t we make something based on that, to remind us what Gucci is? I edited or curated everything into a reminder of what it means to me. Before I start doing my thing, I feel like I needed to do that, not just for me but also for people who are younger.”
Demna goes into more rhapsodies about a simple tailored pant from the Tom Ford era. “Almost no waistband, just a dart, so amazing in terms of construction, how they took away the details and made it more about the aesthetic of the pant. But I find it modern and very relevant today.” The experience was clearly transformative. “I really got excited about minimalism, and when I had to present my vision to Kering before going further, it was a lot of different references to minimalist clothes from different eras. How could I make a new minimalism in fashion without it looking like the 60s? How could I do something different now? That’s what I want to do with Gucci from February onwards when I introduce my personal vision. I want to build on the duality as well, because Gucci is not just that, it’ll always be the extra flamboyance and craziness in my way. But the minimalism excites me more, because I feel that’s the area I can learn the most.”
The notion of Demna as a minimalist is a twist. “I’m kind of all or nothing,” he claims. “I am either a maximalist or a minimalist as a creator. But of course, it’s not going to be just that. I feel like I need to build. What is the Gucci crowd? I think a lot about the people who will be wearing it. This is why the archetypes are a bit like an exercise where I’m creating imaginary characters, like the characters in the movie. And then we enlarge that and see it where it can go. And I think, probably by my show in February, I won’t see them anymore as characters, they’ll just be a crowd.”
The first time Demna explored such an approach was with the Autumn/Winter 2017 Vetements show, inspired by “Exactitudes,” a photo project by a Dutch couple that analysed clothing as signifiers of how people constructed their identities. At the time, Demna said he was obsessed with sociology, but now, when I call him a sociologist, he corrects me: “Or a frustrated filmmaker.”
His Gucci debut gave him an opportunity to explore both fascinations. “La Famiglia” is a fabulous grab bag of idiosyncratically, immaculately dressed-up fashion creatures, a full gamut of headcases who, Demna believes, are ultimately refractions of facets of his own personality. “I learned how to project on people very early on in my life. I grew up in a very scary environment, there was a lot of fighting going on and verbal abuse and stuff like that. And so I was always very vigilant, and I always kind of blamed myself, because apparently, when you experience this at an early age, you dissociate from yourself. I would sit and look at people and wonder what their lives were like, what did they feel. And I think that’s a little bit the reason why I became the sociological designer.”
Working with Spike Jonze yielded a similarly insightful result. The initial idea was a small digital project, but Demna wanted to work with someone who excited him. “And when I first watched Spike’s movies like ‘Adaptation’ and ‘Being John Malkovich’, he was almost like the Margiela of cinema, because it was so different from what I know. Then I saw ‘Her’ and I felt I needed someone like this so it didn’t feel like a commercial ad.” Demna’s involvement extended only so far as clothes from “La Famiglia” that inspired and dressed the characters in the film, but at the same time, he feels Jonze saw into his soul. He got that refraction thing. “I think we sped up my therapy by at least five years on this project.”
“The Tiger” ended up being such a fully immersive Hollywood experience for Demna that it may even have killed a dream. Watching the mechanics of a movie being made was something else for him. “I’m so happy I do clothes and I work in fashion, and I’m so in love with the fashion show where they walk by and then it’s over. I don’t know if my brain could function in a way where all these little bits and pieces are floating around and they all come together in this super complex thing where people act and there are set decorations and script people and so many egos involved. The process is so long. Also, you have to be kind of like a psychologist. I probably feel I just love clothes too much. I think maybe my interest is limited to that.”
But the message of the film had a thunderous resonance for Demna. “It’s about surrender and how human that is. I told Spike yesterday that I only now understand how much I actually learned about myself through this, more than just Gucci or filmmaking. It was hardcore for me, I’m not used to being there, to being involved but not to be in charge, and it’s so good when you manage to do it, because it’s such a beautiful result.”
“I think control is a very dangerous drug,” Demna adds, “and it also blocks you from doing more amazing stuff. You’re so busy pleasing your ego and your brain and whatever intellectual idea you have in your head that you forget about the emotion, the humanity, and actually, when you let go, you see things that you haven’t seen before. And I feel like that, for me, was the moral of this whole project. The whole process of letting go feels so good and so healthy and so hopeful. Control is so hopeless.”
He admits he was surprised when Kering came calling about Gucci at the end of last year. “It was a moment in which I felt like fashion, especially big brands, was all about being safe and the same choice. I felt it was frozen, and didn’t know where to go in that moment. But they knew who I was, they knew I wouldn’t be there inventing my version of quiet luxury.”
When Demna finally made it to the Gucci archives in Florence while he was working on his presentation for Kering, it was a revelation. “I thought, this is a dream like I didn’t even dare to dream. Because all those elements are there. I just have to protect them and modernize the idea of the codes. It’s like you’re a chef, and you cook. [At Balenciaga] I was telling Kering I’m a chef but all I have is a potato and an onion. [At Gucci], the amount of ingredients, it’s like a playground. I have everything. So I don’t have to focus on inventing, or trying to put my DNA into the brand to become a business as well.”
In light of the past few days, it seems almost disingenuous of Demna to insist he was never particularly well-versed in Gucci lore. But he’s telling the truth. Even during the Gucci-Balenciaga “hack” in 2021, when he “exchanged codes” with Alessandro Michele on a joint collection, his research was a skim of Pinterest and some books. “It was not a project in which I really invested myself. To say that this was an opportunity for me to learn about Gucci? Not at all. I made this bag and we had two weeks to release this product, and I thought, ‘OK, what do I do now?’ So I sprayed on it, “This is not a Gucci bag.’ Remember that Magritte painting, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’? And it kind of became viral, because it’s totally stupid in a way. But when I did that last exhibition at Balenciaga, I included this bag, because I believe the universe sends us signs without us realising. There’s something there. I think creativity is a big medium.”
So Demna-and-Gucci is written in the stars, Hollywood and everywhere else. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.