The waiting is over: Demna’s new Gucci is here. And true to his appetite for disruption, it arrived by surprise, dropped via a lookbook 36 hours ahead of the house’s scheduled film-format Milan presentation tomorrow evening.
Entitled La Famiglia, the collection is our first primer into the new Demna-defined grammar of the house. Captured by the Los Angeles-based fine-art photographer Catherine Opie, it is a series of 37 portraits of characters who epitomise “the Gucciness of Gucci” as seen by its new artistic director. From Miss Aperitivo in her sequin minidress, to La VIC in her top-to-toe GG monogram, via the Narcisista whose shirt is unbuttoned almost to his GG buckle belt in a manner not unfamiliar to fans of the house during its Tom Ford era, this family album applies Demna’s sardonic gaze to the long-established codes of his historic new workplace.
Opie’s very first image is captioned L’Archetipo, and shows a newly-constructed Gucci trunk. This was the product on which Gucci’s earliest success was based, when Guccio Gucci, fresh from working at The Savoy Hotel in London, returned home to Florence in 1921 to set up a luggage-maker dedicated to serving the rich and infamous of his time. In the next image Demna begins to write his chapter of the story Guccio started with a look entitled L’Incazzata, or ‘the furious one’. Yet its subject, modelled by Maria Carla Boscono, appears more elegant than enraged in a very 60’s scarlet mid-length coat, gloves, horsebit heels, and Gucci-print headscarf, worn with a Gucci-staple Bamboo bag.
The lookbook proceeds to collide more of those Gucci codes with Demna’s character studies. The most contemporary characters include L’Influencer (in oversized lizard-finish brown leather bomber with matching skirt, Gucci-stripe knit, horsebit slide-pump and full-coverage sunglasses). There’s a menswear look entitled Nerd, whose knit shirt is tied with a bowed ribbon that distinctly references Alessandro Michele’s earliest outing at the house. The most established include La Mecenate (or ‘merchant’ but also a nod to Gucci’s Milan HQ address) in her full length metallic gown and La Contessa, in her Flora print waisted gown with leg o’ mutton sleeves.
According to the Gucci press note today, this collection (and presumably the film that will further showcase it at the presentation tomorrow) has been conceived to act as: “the aesthetic base upon which Demna’s Gucci vision will be built leading up to his first show in February.”
Back in March 2025, at the press conference announcing Demna’s surprise appointment to the job, the house’s now-CEO Francesca Bellettini said: “Gucci has two souls: it has the heritage and it needs to have the fashionability… However it is not enough to inject creativity if the product does not stand for the positioning of Gucci.” This collection certainly looks unmistakably Gucci, and its Opie-shuttered lens has been finely calibrated to Demna’s disruptive and irreverent settings. We can only wait to see how that collision of subject and object develops—and the first indication will come when this collection goes on sale at ten Gucci stores around the world later this week.
