Demna’s New Gucci: Character First
Anders Christian Madsen reviews Demna’s debut collection and film for Gucci, for Spring-Summer 2026.
The day before his debut presentation as Creative Director of Gucci, Demna dropped a look book of 37 framed silhouettes. Each was labeled with the name of an Italian archetype, from “Sciura” to “Figo” and “La Bomba.” Anthropology is Demna’s love language. Since his Vetements days, he has portrayed and elevated everyday characters, evolving the idea from normality to celebrity through his mind-altering career at Balenciaga. His debut looks were classic Demna through a Gucci lens: a fetishization of inadvertent pedestrian styling expressed in too-short tops, inherited retro-fit garments, glamour so glamorous it tips into subversion, and richness expressed with excess. Many of Tom Ford’s tropes for the house also made their way into the collection, with due reverence.
The look book saluted a screening at Palazzo Mezzanotte staged with all the pomp of a movie premiere. If you expected a typical fashion film (performance art and nonsense narrative) you were wrong. After the arrivals of directors Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn, as well as lead actor Demi Moore, Milan Fashion Week was introduced to Demna’s Gucci. Titled The Tiger, the film is a fully functional mini-feature centered on the family gathering of an alternate-universe Gucci dynasty with Moore as matriarch, set in Los Angeles where Demna and his husband have been living of late. With nods to Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, it captures a disastrous dinner party of spiked drinks, crazed behavior, and eccentric characters—all dressed in looks from the collection.
GUCCI
GUCCI
The cast features Edward Norton, Elliott Page, and Keke Palmer as Moore’s children; Alia Shawkat as the daughter’s girlfriend; and Ed Harris as a Vanity Fair journalist shadowing Moore for a profile. Julianne Nicholson and Heather Lawless — who appear only briefly toward the end — steal the show as hilariously evil fashion-editor twins, both clad in the dramatically collared black dress from the collection called “La Snob.” Demna has spent most of his life in fashion — from Maison Margiela to Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga — and knows its characters as well as anyone. Entering Gucci, this high fortress of fashion with a capital F, his first move felt like an homage to the industry’s eccentrics and egos: the people we love to hate and wouldn’t want to live without. Mirrored in the collection it framed, the film said a lot about his intentions for the house.
Gucci is a platform that thrives on character. From the illustrious family that shaped it (immortalized in the Lady Gaga film House of Gucci) to past designers Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele, a strong personality and a sense of eccentricity are catnip spray in these hallowed halls. As the work of Ford and Michele illustrated, what people want from Gucci isn’t just a look but a character to inhabit: a role that makes us stand a little taller and act a little braver. As we await Demna’s debut runway collection in February, that sense of character-building is in safe hands. The introductory collection he released ahead of the screening was, in many ways, textbook Demna applied to Gucci’s genetics. As a jumping-off point, it made sense.
GUCCI
GUCCI
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