Demna’s most recent time-wasting scheme involved shutting down Times Square last Saturday night so its 250,000 idle tourists could be replaced by 63 idle models draped in meaningless, lazily conceived designs.
Gucci’s advertising cartel have evidently been greasing the wheels of publicity, with a chorus of adulation echoing from the pages of Haute Living (“grounded in real life, real people, and the unmistakable energy of a city”), Hypebeast (“flawlessly blended technical utility with unapologetic extravagance”) and AnOther, to name only a handful of offenders. Press around Demna has always wavered between obvious press release regurgitation at its best and blatant anti-art sentiment at its worst; consider this 2017 profile praising his “approach to the garments he creates… as a product to be bought and sold. This might seem cynical or self-indulgent but it has taught his rivals that all the consumer really wants is your trademark sweatshirt, trench coat or jeans, recreated season after season, rather than an artistic vision created from scratch every 6 months.” I suppose someone has to cater to the lowest common denominator, season after season.
But before the clothes could even be glimpsed, Gucci plastered Times Square’s digital billboards with an array of products real (a line of jewelry available for sale), fictional (a new brand of luxury water), and somewhere in between (“Gucci Pets,” real products modeled by AI-generated dogs). “As a demonstration of power,” AnOther gushes, “and a marketing exercise – it was hardcore.”
When the time came for the clothes to finally appear, perhaps afraid (and rightfully so) his tired designs might not suffice to catch anyone’s attention, Demna engaged in his own bit of stunt casting, pulling in not just celebrity models including Paris Hilton and Candice Swanepoel but also Tom Brady, who managed to pull off one of the only striking looks in the entire show, a poorly-tailored black leather ensemble almost bold enough to distract from how much he looks like Brett from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
The name of the show was “GucciCore,” and Demna’s goal was to create something “precise, considered, unmistakably Gucci.” As the label’s creative director for the last year, Demna has brought the venerable house the same soulless, elevated H&M aesthetic on which he first wasted everybody’s time at Louis Vuitton before co-founding Vetements and subsequently piloting Balenciaga to their creative nadir.
As Hypebeast so generously put it, “GucciCore isn’t just about temporary seasonal trends; it is a permanent love letter to the authentic, pluralistic style of New York City, proving that the House’s storied DNA looks right at home on the city streets — whether you are a skater in SoHo or a seven-time Super Bowl champion turning heads in the front row.” AnOther waxes etymological: “In popular subcultural parlance – Gorpcore, Cottagecore and the like – it defines the most central, the most fundamental attribute of a particular thing. …In fashion, ‘core’ is also the name given to a rooted collection that sticks around for a long time – core classics. Which was the aim in this collection, peopled as it was with slick suiting, tailored coats, silk dresses, denim separates, GG-logo belts, lots of bags, and a big old Gucci red-and-green webbing strap slapped like a censor bar across a bared chest as a bandeau top. And Demna’s first GucciCore model came out clutching – what else – a big red apple, pierced with a gold Gucci-branded sticker. That’s got a core, too.” Great minds at work, people! A natural fit, then, for the show to be held in Times Square, an unmistakably GucciCore location: a shadow of its former self, to be avoided by anyone with taste. From the billboards to the clothes, massive amounts of time and money were wasted in grafting a surface of couture glitz onto a hollow core of outlet clothing.
But of course it’s been years since anyone uttered the syllables /ˈɡuː.tʃi/ with any enthusiasm outside of a hip-hop track, certainly since Alessandro Michele jumped ship for Valentino, after which Gucci’s sales nearly halved. But the Italian label still accounts for nearly half the revenue of its owner, Kering S.A., the French conglomerate which also owns Balencia, YSL and Alexander McQueen, among many other companies, none of which are nearly so lucrative as Gucci. It thus makes perfect sense for Kering CEO Luca de Meo both to pin his company’s future on the House of Gucci and to partner with a designer who shares his own dim views on art and creativity, which he rather succinctly summarized after Demna’s first runway show for Gucci earlier this year:
I tend not to make a judgment on the creative because it’s not my job. But I think I saw a lot of product, good materials, and execution that was at the right level. I saw a lot of codes that are typically recognizable, and I think that’s great for brands.
Great for brands, indeed, or at least for Gucci’s; meanwhile Alexander McQueen lays off a whopping 54 of their 181 employees. Kering doesn’t seem to care a lick for the clear auteurism of Anthony Vaccarello at YSL or Louise Trotter at Bottega (currently making a serious run at Hermès), to say nothing of supporting Pier Paolo Piccioli as he takes the reins at Balenciaga. Instead, in the wake of China’s economic slowdown,* Kering and the rest of the West have shifted their gaze back onto themselves, to Dior and Hermès in LA and Gucci and Louis Vuitton in New York.
The best moments in the Times Square show were the microwaved leftovers from the Tom Ford era, though contrary to their runway debuts they appeared this time wholly without styling or even tailoring. And some credit due to Demna: whenever he seemed to remember the esteemed house he’s running, Gucci’s heritage floral prints provided necessary counterweight to the heavy black silhouettes he exclusively favors otherwise.
Sixty-three models walked in as many outfits and carried fifty-two bags, sometimes two at once to maximize the sale of leather goods, including backpacks and satchels to carry forth de Meo’s design of “greater functionality” and a “robust mid-range price proposition,” phrases seemingly concocted by a robot to cause instant vomiting among non-shareholders.
“For 10 years, I tried to impress,” Demna said of his career as a designer — though who he’s been trying to impress remains an open question — “and I tried to impress myself. Show that I was a smart designer. At Gucci, I got this sudden rush of emotion. I realized I can create from an emotional space — fashion that triggers emotion and feelings. Either you love it or hate it.” I know where I stand, but if nothing else the sudden realization at 45 years old that your art can come “from an emotional space” at least represents some form of growth.
* There’s much to be said for China’s increasing disinterest and ongoing cultural shift away from Euro-American high fashion hegemony, but we’ll leave that for another time.
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