Gucci. Spring 2027 - Milan Fashion Week

Don't you miss Demna Gvasalia's Balenciaga days?  Be it his ex-Vetements, antithesis, fashion backlash, despite its possibility of being a feigned attempt at the postmodern, as a simulacrum and appeal to his celebrity-dom collective.  I kinda do.  From disheveled sneakers at $1500, through to backlash graphic t-shirts and homage to his Tbilisi, Georgia rave days, when East Europeans could only dream of wearing an actual, not an oddly shaped knock off, Nike or Adidas hoodie.

Demna is now five shows in for the fame Italian fashion house, owned by $30 billion dollar net worth Kering S.A Group, to which the Georgian designer churned through $10 million of Kering's cash pile, to stage his Resort 2027 collection at Times Square in May of this year, ala Demna's "Guccicore".  And with a poverty rate in New York City over 25%, equating to more than 2+ million New Yorkers living below the poverty line, the absurd could easily be affixed to the obscene, with no rhyme or reason, that the once backlash 'lord' of fashion, would see  opulence, and extreme wealth posturing as an artistic cue, anymore than a blatant slap in the face of the poor and the financial divide within Trump's Fascist America.

Demna's jump from backlash, gritty, postmodern, pop-art of Balenciaga, to hyper-capitalist 'realism' of Gucci is actually painful to witness, a former refugee of post Soviet Georgia in the early 1990s, the backlash now seems almost manufactured as an assimilation to the Trumpist capitalism engine of making America Great Again via political extremity and scapegoats, by jamming excesses as high they can go, it appears Demna is riding along with his current Gucci tenure.  And for his Spring 2027 "Storefront" Gucci show, he actually recreated a massive prop 'Gucci storefront' at the Allianz MiCo events space in Milan's Portello district.  With no expenses spared, although not disclosed, as the NYC Times Square show was.  He had this to say for his latest array: "My first year at Gucci was dedicated to understanding and formulating what Gucci stands for. The conclusion of my research is that Gucci stands for being rooted in the desire to belong to a more glamorous world, and in the audacity to remake that world in your own image." 

And Guccio Gucci's history is indeed interesting, and possible correlating to Demna's apparent moral dilemma of appealing to the hierarchal of wealthy clients, over pop art, and its nihilistic backlash that was his Balenciaga days, with his desire to adjust to a new found elitism with Gucci.  Considering that during the 1920s and 1930s, Gucci's clientele did include wealthy members of the Italian Fascist regime as well as international travelers and movie stars.  Sound familiar?  

Maybe Demna has also tapped the ghost of Italian Fascist Julius Evola, re: “Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy.” 

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(A.Glass 2026)