Backstage at his first show, Demna squeezes up and down the model lineup, which curls along a hallway thick with hairdressers and security personnel. “ The feeling when someone falls in love with someone? I have it now,” he tells me. “I’m also worried about one million things—the shoes, the sweat—but we can’t control these things, so worrying is useless, apparently.” He grins. “I read that somewhere.”
The show will be held in the Palazzo delle Scintille, a large hall in Milan that Demna refashioned as a venue for Gucci. He had been inspired by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the house’s historical and spiritual home, and, with the Uffizi’s permission, had some classical statues there replicated. They line the periphery of the Palazzo’s inner hall, which proceeds down coliseum-like steps to a long central corridor that will serve as the runway. “ We built a museum for the show, basically,” Demna says. “My idea was to put Gucci back into the spotlight of the Italian Renaissance.” There were, of course, other objectives too. As guests take their seats in the Palazzo delle Scintille, someone whispers, “There are so many supermodels here.”
True enough. The cast includes Kate Moss, Karlie Kloss, and Gabbriette, but also figures unaccustomed to the runway, such as the rappers Fakemink and Nettspend. (“ I invited, in the cast, people that I always wanted to meet,” Demna explains to me.)
As the house lights go down, a bright shaft appears down the runway. The model Charlie Jones steps into it, wearing a high-collar sleeveless white dress and carrying a classic black Gucci bag. The dress is tight and revealing enough to display a tattoo on the upper thigh. (“It’s the most body-conscious I’ve ever been,” Demna says. “I’ve had a really good therapist for 10 years and, finally, I’ve started to like myself.”) Jones, a trans man, cross-steps briskly, followed by a gym-built man in white pants and a similar shirt. The show, like all of Demna’s at Gucci, mixes men’s and women’s looks. “ I think the idea of splitting fashion by gender is very old—I think there’s a systemic glitch in this,” he says. When the muscleman walks past, somebody cries, “Wow.”
Uncharacteristically for Demna, who at Balenciaga was known for his raucous, intensifying presentations, the show blooms into poetic sequined dresses and male models who walk barefoot. “ It’s very romantic, very like Botticelli, almost like they came off the painting in a way,” he explains. “It’s a different type of beauty than I’ve ever touched on—more classic beauty, but pushed, exaggerated.” When Moss appears to end the show, in a black backless sequined dress, a cheer breaks out: An old vision is made new again.
In 1993, Demna’s family fled their hometown of Sukhumi, Georgia, under threat of ethnic cleansing, and landed in Tbilisi. One of his first jobs, at 17, was translating Reuters copy for Georgian TV, and, since then, he has rarely succeeded in outrunning the news. (On September 11, 2001, as horrific reports streamed in New York, it was the young Demna who did the simultaneous translation for the Georgian audience.) Nor has he long settled in one place.
