| Gucci presented its Spring 2027 collection in Milan on Friday, staged inside a full-scale replica of a Gucci flagship store titled “The Store Show.” Creative director Demna built the show around three pillars – equestrian heritage, a character called “La Signora,” and sharp tailoring – marking his most cohesive Gucci collection to date. |
On Friday, Milan’s fashion crowd walked into what looked like a Gucci flagship store, but it wasn’t. The set was built with marble walls, velvet seating, and shelves of accessories that were so convincing that at least one guest beside me asked when the store had opened. That confusion was the point. Demna calls it “The Store Show,” and it serves as a blueprint for the future of Gucci’s physical retail and the clearest statement yet of his vision for the brand.
A year ago, Demna’s Gucci arrived quietly through a lookbook and a short film starring Demi Moore. Since then, he has experimented with nearly every version of the brand, including the moody La Famiglia aesthetic he grew up admiring, a controversial February show centered on body-conscious tailoring, and a more extravagant GucciCore presentation in Times Square over the summer. None of those felt settled. This one does. Backstage, Demna admitted that it took him a full year to understand what Gucci actually means to him because Gucci is so many things at once.
The collection rests on three pillars: equestrian heritage, a character he calls “La Signora,” and sharp tailoring. These aren’t marketing labels, but rather a genuine attempt to reconcile Gucci’s contradictions. Demna has said that the house sits between the bourgeois and the eccentric, and between Florence and Hollywood. He believes that neither half works without the other. Watching the show, you could see him testing that theory piece by piece.
The equestrian references opened strong. A fitted, three-button jacket cinched at the waist with a small, silver horsebit on each lapel and paired with white breeches and riding boots read as instantly wearable and unmistakably Gucci. Later, Naty Abascal – the Spanish style icon whose 1970s wardrobe has become an unlikely reference point for the house – wore a crisp trench that nodded to the same bourgeois Milanese woman Demna kept returning to in his notes.
Then came the twist. A series of slightly feral boarding-school looks brought bomber jackets, popped-collar rugby shirts, and tartan kilts, all of which were accented by oversize horsebit hardware. Jeans hung low from multi-buckle belts. Chains piled up at the neck. These looks had a rougher edge that recalled Demna’s years at Balenciaga. The peaked-shoulder tailoring was snug rather than swollen and felt like the most instinctive element of the show.
The menswear line was full of surprises. Demna pushed himself toward cropped trousers, no socks, and loafers – an aristocratic style that he once said frightened him. He referenced Dawn Mello, the Bergdorf Goodman executive credited with modernizing Gucci’s fashion image in the late 1980s. The result had an aristo hunk quality reminiscent of the late 1980s that suited him better than expected. Considering how far his background is from that world, his confidence said something about how much ground he has covered this year.
The womenswear collection ended with a focus on engineering rather than restraint. The final evening dress, draped over one shoulder and held in place by a teardrop-shaped metal weight, was the look that Demna named as his proudest. A powder-pink gown that appeared to be merely propped onto the body and secured by a single silver hook in the back pushed in the opposite direction, toward fragility rather than structure. Between these two extremes was a slinky, jersey evening gown that nodded to Tom Ford’s 1990s Gucci without copying it outright.
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The casting reinforced the split personality that Demna has described. Poppy Delevingne, Amanda Harlech, and Bianca Jagger walked alongside a front row that included Cardi B, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, and tennis players Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner. The mix felt deliberate, with old-guard elegance beside newer, louder fame – which is more or less the argument the clothes themselves were making.
For readers interested in how runway ideas like this reach the streets, the Gucci Spring 2027 collection points to two entryways rather than one. The horsebit hardware, worked into belts, bag straps, and shoe buckles, is the kind of accessory-level signature that usually reaches Gucci’s ready-to-wear and licensed lines fastest. The cropped-trouser, no-sock, loafer combination that Demna popularized in menswear is also the easiest idea to adopt directly from the show at a fraction of the cost of an entire aristocratic ensemble.
Demna described his process as similar to assembling a Lego set: taking pieces of Gucci’s bourgeois and eccentric identities and fitting them together to form a coherent whole. Sexiness, he said, has always come easily to him. Bourgeois restraint scared him more and required real digestion before he could trust himself with it. For Spring 2027, this discomfort produced his most convincing collection at Gucci yet, built less on shock and more on a designer who sounds confident in his role. This certainty, more than any single look, distinguishes this show from Demna’s first year at Gucci – and it’s the clearest sign yet that his vision for the brand is here to stay.
