The Tamesis
As I walked the sunny streets of Brera, Milan’s design district, over the past few days, I noticed the same series of images wherever I went. (Well, when I caught a glimpse of them in the crowd, they were holding maps under their arms, checking off the seemingly endless list of exhibitions popping up nearby.) Pictures of Demna’s first handbag ad campaign for Gucci were plastered on billboards everywhere, in which Kate Moss and Emily Ratajkowski were in lingerie, carrying only a bag to protect their dignity, or staring out the window in knee-high boots emblazoned with the letters GG. Raccoon kohl eyes.
Just over a year after he was named artistic director of Gucci, Demna’s vision for the Florentine fashion house is (finally) fully realized. Plenty of columns have been devoted to his debut show, which included 3D scanned replicas of ancient Roman statues from the Uffizi Gallery and a diverse cast that paid homage to Gucci bosses past and present: ’90s football players, late-night-turned-early-morning party girls, Gen-Z bedroom rappers. (And, of course, those jaw-dropping miniskirts and muscle T-shirts.)
But there is no need to re-argue this point here. What am I? will Suffice to say, Demna’s vision was not at all that shocking when seeing the ads on a sunny spring afternoon in Milan. I attempted to conduct an (admittedly, very unscientific) survey of people I spotted wearing Gucci and those wearing heavily logoed clothing, many of whom could have walked straight from the Gucci runway in Demna to Via Brera. In Milan, at least, logomania is still alive and well. That’s Demner’s point.
Bastien Archard
On Monday night during Milan Design Week, some of the city’s fashionistas wearing Gucci were likely to head to Chiostro di San Simpliciano, tucked away in a tree-lined piazza behind Via Garibaldi. There, in the center of the cloister of this former monastery, a huge dark pavilion fell to the ground like a monolith within it. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Inside, a well-dressed crowd is placing tickets with QR codes into vending machines. The tickets prompt one of four cans of cocktails, inspired by prototypes from his debut lookbook “La Famiglia”, to land on the tray with a bang: “Drama Queen”, “Fashion Icon”, “Mega Pesantone” or “Super Incazzata”. (The latter two roughly translate to bland boredom, and a vulgar term for an angry person, respectively.) I was delighted to receive a fashion icon: a concoction of mint tequila, passion fruit cordial, and fresh lemon juice in a bright pink jar with a gimmicky logo reminiscent of sugary fruit sodas.
