Welcome to a New Era: Demna’s La Famiglia Reimagines Gucci
Ever since the news broke that Demna, designer of Balenciaga fame, would take the reins at Gucci, I have been waiting for that first signal of what this new chapter might feel like. With La Famiglia, Demna does not hold back. He delivers a surprise lookbook that reads like a family portrait of Gucci’s many faces, archetypes drawn from past, present, and perhaps even predicted futures. Familiarly Gucci, yet unmistakably Demna.
The Concept: “La Famiglia” and Archetypes
Titled La Famiglia, the collection is fashioned as a study of “Gucciness.” It leans into characters: the glammed up, the irreverent, the elegant, the outrageous. There is “La VIP,” “Nerd,” “Influencer,” “Miss Aperitivo,” “La Bomba,” “La Principessa,” and even a male model as “Bastardo,” capturing a mix of sensuality, swagger, and storytelling. Each persona is not just about clothing; it is about attitude, identity, and performance. The launch was unexpected, a digital drop just before Milan Fashion
Week, photographed by Catherine Opie, anchoring visual drama with the gravitas of archival memory.
Demna’s creative team leaned into Gucci’s storied history. The campaign’s photographer, Catherine Opie, frames these archetypes with precision and intimacy, more portrait than runway. Accessories are revived: the Gucci Bamboo 1947 bag reappears, the Horsebit loafer gets a refresh. Prints like the legendary Flora motif make a comeback, reminding us of Gucci’s long relationship with elegance, romanticism, and its vintage scarf legacies.
Fabrication and silhouette are both tribute and evolution. Dramatic gowns with feather trim, sharp tailoring, exaggerated shoulders, low-rise trousers, sheer and revealing layers echo much of what made Tom Ford’s era iconic. Yet Demna layers in irony, theatricality, and that modern tension between glamour and exposure. It is Gucci with an edge: flamboyant, daring, luxurious.
Heritage Reimagined: Familiar Archetypes
What strikes me most is how Demna reaches back without pastiche to take familiar archetypes that already live in Gucci’s DNA. The “It Girl,” the femme fatale, the influencer, the principessa, these archetypes feel rooted in Gucci’s history of glamour, Italian elegance, the bold sexual energy of the 1990s, and the playful showmanship Tom Ford sparked. Demna does not replicate; he riffs. The heritage is there, in the monograms, the bamboo handles, the flora prints, the craftsmanship, but refracted through his lens of maximal drama and character. It feels less like a reboot and more like reclaiming, remapping what the house has always been capable of.
The Gucci La Famiglia campaign highlights a cast of models as diverse as they are prestigious, powerfully embodying the archetypes dear to Gucci. Among them, Alex Consani, Lila Moss, Mariacarla Boscono, and Bianca Huisman bring generational and stylistic diversity, while Achol Kuir, Alana Champion, Khadim Sock, and Tetiana Marchuk inject a contemporary energy that blurs the traditional boundaries of gender and fashion. The casting, led by Piergiorgio Del Moro, is photographed by Catherine Opie, with hair by Guido Palau and makeup by Sam Visser, allowing each model not only to wear Demna’s creations but to live them as characters. Strong, expressive, at once familiar and transformed.
Demna’s La Famiglia is more than a debut. It is a statement of intent. It tells us who Gucci will be under his watch: unapologetically sexy, unafraid of extravagance, steeped in heritage but looking sideways into the future. For longtime lovers of Gucci, there is comfort and recognition. For newcomers, there is wild energy and something to get intrigued by. If this is only the soft launch, then the question is not whether Gucci under Demna can succeed, but how high the stakes will be and how boldly he will draw lines between icon and invention. Gucci has turned a page. And it is a page worth watching.
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