When Demna stepped into Gucci, he didn’t describe archives or legacies. He described ingredients. “At Balenciaga I was a chef with only a potato and an onion,” he said. “At Gucci, the amount of ingredients, it’s like a playground. I have everything.”
That shift — from survival cooking to gourmet experimentation — tells you everything about where Gucci is headed under his direction. Balenciaga was built on scarcity, on twisting the ordinary into the apocalyptic. A destroyed sneaker, an exaggerated hoodie, a trench dragging across wet asphalt. Demna turned minimal resources into maximum shock, carving a global identity out of absence and rawness.
Gucci, though, offers him abundance. Endless archives, lush fabrics, wild prints, tailoring codes that stretch from Savile Row elegance to bohemian excess. It’s as if Demna has gone from fighting for flavor to drowning in it. And this is where the story becomes interesting: will Gucci under Demna become about preservation, about “protecting” its codes, or will it become the most fearless remix fashion has seen in years?
Already, the tone feels different. Where Alessandro Michele drowned Gucci in romantic maximalism, layering folklore onto every surface, Demna is approaching the house with a scalpel. He talks about modernising, about stripping back without erasing. If Balenciaga was the brutalist poem, Gucci might become the symphony — same architect, but with more instruments, more room for elegance.
The challenge is balance. Gucci is a brand with a century’s worth of cultural memory — Jackie bags, bamboo handles, Tom Ford’s sex-soaked 90s tailoring. To enter this house is to enter a museum, and Demna knows it. That’s why he calls himself a chef: he isn’t rewriting the recipes, he’s reinterpreting them, keeping the essence while pushing the taste forward.
We’ve already seen sparks. The tailoring has become sharper, the accessories lean more toward power than whimsy, and there’s a darker current running through the collections, one that feels closer to today’s appetite for sleekness over chaos. Gucci, under Demna, seems less interested in pleasing everyone and more in holding its ground as a cultural force.
The industry is watching closely. Gucci is no small experiment — it’s Kering’s crown jewel, the house that bankrolls the rest. Demna knows this. At Balenciaga, the mission was survival. At Gucci, the mission is permanence. If Balenciaga made him the enfant terrible of fashion, Gucci may be what cements him as a builder of empires.
For years, fashion critics asked if Demna could survive outside the shock machine of Balenciaga. Now, with Gucci at his fingertips, the answer feels clear: survival is behind him. Creation is the game now. He has the archives, the fabrics, the history, the codes — all the ingredients. The only thing left is to cook.
