“I think fashion is FOMO,” said Demna. “Fashion has to create FOMO. I’m a fashion consumer, and I love when I see something and I don’t need it—because nobody needs fashion—but I have a FOMO of not having it. This is the magic of fashion. A lot of people try to rationalize fashion, but it’s not rational: it’s about creating an unexpected and absolutely unnecessary desire.”
As he finesses his fresh formula for FOMO at Gucci in advance of February’s first runway serving, Demna is currently deep in the process of creative R&D. Where September’s La Famiglia bridge collection was more about categorizing some core ingredients—he said its archival-based riff on archetypes was originally conceived as a research project, rather than the full-blown movie premier presentation it dropped as—this second chapter saw him experiment more freely with their expression. As he put it: “It feels very liberating for me creatively now to just make stuff without overthinking it. To really more use my emotional response to something as a filter rather than brain, intellect, or concept”
The collection was doubly subject to Demna’s lens. He shot the lookbook himself as an on-purpose echo of that big bang moment when Gucci first fired fashion FOMO. He said: “These images were very much in my Gucci memory. I wanted to recreate that as if it was a Gucci show that is not on Vogue Runway for some reason.” Along with plentiful references to Ford-era cutting-edge Gucci the collection was a wide-ranging fusion that encompassed classic ’70s pre-fashion Gucci and also touched upon later, 21st century phases. Of Frida Giannini’s time at the brand, for instance, he observed: “There is a certain Italian feminine glamour to what she did that I find very rare to see.”
What crystallized this collage into coherence was the “emotional,” even sometimes self-centered, approach to Demna’s articulation of Gucci product. Of the Lunetta Phone+, his first-ever bag for the brand that’s a wrist-strapped wisp of a thing just big enough to stash a wallet and a digital device in, he said: “Actually it’s a little bit of a selfish bag, because I made it for myself.” Of the leather racer jacket with Gucci-color Web stripes down each sleeve, he noted: “This is a jacket I made for myself because there were a lot of racing jackets in the archive, but the fits were a bit too ’90s. I wanted to do a fit that is more now, using Web as a branding.” There was a black, point-toed Valigeria ballerina drawn from the archive and rebooted in his size. His ballsy V-neck t-shirts—a heavy flirt with the boundaries of current conventional menswear taste—were generated by a deep-rooted memory of his own teenage FOMO. He said: “I’m going there! I realized the V-neck is such a Gucci item.”
Provocatively positioning the banal to make it seem strange (and thus ignite FOMO) has been part of Demna’s MO across his body of work. What’s changing at Gucci is his approach to silhouette and the body contained within it. He said: “My Gucci aesthetic is quite body-conscious, both for boy and girl.” This shift, he elaborated, reflects a positive change in his relationship with his own body. He said: “I think that’s how it is with creative work, it has to go through you.” That subjective starting point has sparked a much wider consideration of fit. He has introduced a small atelier in the brand’s Milan space to buffer between his design process and development production. “It’s big enough for making toiles, making maquette. It’s a very French school, but I come from that school.” Here, he said, he has begun a process of approaching sizing in a much more variably precise and tailored manner than conventional grading. “We all have different proportions,” he said, adding: “I’m not a good designer if I can only make clothes for models.”
Alongside this updated approach to size and fit, came a fresh consideration of weight. He said: “Specifically, what I was really into was the lightness of a garment, bags, shoes, everything. I find that everything is very rigid and heavy in general. I feel the way luxury brands want to present themselves is to be durable, and durable means rigid and heavy: I don’t know why. I feel like my idea of luxury today is absolutely the opposite of that.” As we browsed the rail, Demna illustrated this by lifting the hem of a bulky looking but vapor-light coat of black feathers stitched into mousseline. A constrictive-looking bonded wool scuba top was similarly supple. Other lightening was achieved through the removal of detail; side seams and front pockets (in fact hidden within the waistband) were subtracted from jeans, while a tracksuit template was rigorously minimized into a chic black cashmere silk-jersey travel suit.
“Fashion needs to be edgy,” said Demna. This collection revealed a little more about the shape of Gucci’s edge ahead.