While walking the sunny streets of Brera, Milan’s design district, over the past few days, I kept noticing the same series of images wherever I turned. (Well, when I could glimpse them between the throngs of people with fold-out maps tucked under their arms, checking off the seemingly endless array of exhibitions that had sprung up across the neighborhood.) On billboards everywhere were images of Demna’s first handbag campaign for Gucci, featuring Kate Moss and Emily Ratajkowski posing in underwear with just a bag to protect their modesty or wearing knee-high GG-monogrammed boots, staring out through raccoon-like kohl-rimmed eyes.
Just over a year after he was appointed artistic director at Gucci, Demna’s vision for the Florentine fashion house has (finally) been fully realized. Plenty of column inches have already been dedicated to unpacking his debut runway show, with its monumental set of 3D-scanned replicas of ancient Roman statues from the Uffizi, and the motley casting that nodded to Gucci-heads past and present: ’90s footballers, late-night-turned-early-morning party girls, Gen Z bedroom rappers. (And, of course, all those eye-popping mini skirts and muscle tees.)
But there’s no need to relitigate that here. What I will say is that, seeing the adverts in the context of a balmy spring afternoon in Milan, Demna’s vision felt altogether less shocking. I attempted to take a (highly unscientific, admittedly) survey of the people I spotted wearing Gucci, and those wearing heavily logoed looks in general—and many of them could have walked straight off Demna’s Gucci runway and onto Via Brera. In Milan at least, logomania is alive and well. Which was sort of Demna’s point.
Though it could well have been that some of those Gucci-clad city slickers on the Monday evening of Milan Design Week were headed to the Chiostro di San Simpliciano, tucked away on a piazza behind the Corso Garibaldi. There, at the center of a cloister in this former convent, an enormous jet black pavilion had landed like one of the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Within it, a flamboyantly dressed crowd was placing tickets with QR codes into a vending machine. The tickets prompted one of four canned cocktails, inspired by the archetypes that filled his debut lookbook “La Famiglia,” to fall with a thunk into a tray: a Drama Queen, Fashion Icon, Mega Pesantone, or Super Incazzata. (The latter two translate roughly as a tedious bore, and a vulgar term for an angry woman, respectively.) I was flattered to receive a Fashion Icon: a concoction of mint-infused tequila, passion fruit cordial, and fresh lemon juice, that came in a bright pink can with a garish logo that recalled a sugary fruit soda.
The real draw, however, lay deeper inside. Within the courtyard of an even larger cloister, where a fountain trickled at the center, a meadow of wildflowers—cosmos in shades of white, soft pink, and deep magenta—had grown, punctuated by spindly bushes of deep red roses. Walking around the arcade, a series of 12 monumental tapestries hung proudly, spinning a yarn of the history of the house of Gucci. (Collectively, they were titled Gucci Memoria.)
A woman with Botticelli-style waves and a brocaded cloak offers a pomegranate to a man in a bellhop’s outfit, a nod to Guccio Gucci’s stint working at the Savoy Hotel. A group of leather artisans cuts and stitches animal hides in an atelier overlooking Florence’s Duomo. In one tapestry, a trio of brothers poses in contrapposto like the Three Graces, as a woman in a bridal gown floats in from stage right; in the next, they tussle over a length of fabric in a Renaissance villa depicted with the rigid linear perspective of Perugino’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. (You could read those specific pieces as a nod to the infamous family feud that threatened to tear the company apart throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, as immortalized by Ridley Scott in House of Gucci.)
As a particularly delightful touch, there was a tapestry dedicated to Alessandro Michele’s tenure at the house; Demna and Michele are famously on good terms, with the former collaborators appearing on the front rows of each other’s runway shows. The panel featured a dandyish bearded figure on horseback, leading a parade of figures carrying a miniature dragon and their very own disembodied head—a nod to the brand’s fall 2018 collectsion. There was also a gothy reinterpretation of The Birth of Venus, with the central figure sporting what appeared to be the Tom Ford-era blue silk shirt Madonna wore to the 1995 VMAs.
And in the final tapestry, there was Demna himself, beavering away in the Gucci atelier of today: kneeling forward from a gaming chair in a leather jacket, applying the finishing touches to the red coat worn by Mariacarla Boscono in the La Famiglia collectsion, as one last, deliciously meta twist. (Demna could be spotted IRL at the opening event, sitting under one of the cloister’s arches surrounded by friends, clearly reveling in the animated reactions of guests as they played a game of “spot the reference.”)
Some people loved it, some people hated it. It’s Demna, after all. Personally, I thought it was a hoot. With his first collectsions for the house, Demna has essentially turned a funhouse mirror back on Italian culture and style, asking: Where do you draw the line between such masterpieces of classical antiquity and the Renaissance that hang in museums like the Uffizi, and the kitschy recreations on tote bags and fridge magnets being hawked at the stalls crowding the streets outside those tourist spots? How do most people really consume Italy’s cultural output?
You could read that as cynical; I read it as honest. Walk past the Coliseum at the height of summer, or through the Uffizi as hundreds of camera phones snap away at Botticelli’s Primavera, and you can’t ignore the Disneyland-ification of some of these most sacred Italian cultural sites. Plus—and this is coming from a devoted Italophile—the Italians can be a little self-serious about their cultural heritage and design pedigree. Not all of what they make is stylish or beautiful; some of it is, in fact, a little tacky. That’s part of what makes it so glorious. (It’s also okay to poke a little fun at it occasionally, especially when it comes with a dose of wry, affectionate humor.)
As always, there’s yet another layer to what Demna is getting at. Before I left the cloisters, I enquired with someone who worked there as to where and how the tapestries were manufactured. It turned out they had actually been crafted by Tessitura Grassi, a family of artisans based outside Bergamo that has been making tapestries since the 1950s, using custom looms to create works that would rival the intricacy of anything you’d find in the Vatican Museums. The exhibition might be provocative, and it certainly got people talking—it was the subject of heated debate at the dinner I attended immediately afterwards. But it’s also clever and witty, and takes the stuff that should be taken seriously—namely, Gucci’s role as a steward of Italian craftsmanship—very seriously indeed. What more could you want than that?
