We Touched Demna's AirPods at Gucci's Times Square Show
If you feel like you’ve seen all the people from Gucci’s Cruise collection before, good! That means you get it. The set for the show might’ve been extravagant — stopping traffic in Times Square, taking over all the surrounding digital billboards, and turning New York’s most touristy neighborhood into a Gucci runway — but the clothes were down to earth, in a sexy Y2K kinda way.
Highsnobiety learned this first-hand after the show when we went to a private re-see for a closer look at all the new-season goods.
There, we saw quotidian clothes with flourishes of Demna’s creativity.
Like a sweater with a knit that becomes looser at the end of the arm to form a makeshift cuff and lightwash straight-leg horsebit jeans, an early favorite from Demna’s Gucci tenure, which have evolved so that metal ornamentation now embellishes the waistband.
By far the wildest stuff was accessories.
There were Gucci-branded fake car keys designed to dangle from trousers (similar to keys from the Balenciaga x Lamborghini collaboration Demna masterminded) and diamond-encrusted tiger rings with red eyes formed by gemstones.
The bags, of which there were plenty, with many models during the show wearing three at a time, included an ergonomic backpack and a classic cake box in exotic leathers like supple ostrich leather and red alligator skin.
Not everything was Gucci-branded, though, or quite so lavish. During the show, the first model carried a well-waxed red apple (how fitting for the Big Apple!), a presumably performative male held three books in his hand instead of stuffing them inside his two bags, and black AirPod Maxes, worn around the model's neck, reappeared at the re-see with its corresponding black leather jacket.
These are all pretty normal things for New Yorkers to schlep around, so of course, they were carried by Demna’s “normal” New Yorkers. The idea for the show was that the 63 protagonists who strutted along the grey concrete of New York’s most packed pedestrian intersection were, as Gucci’s press release puts it, “people one might pass on the street.” Classic Demna!
Part of the Gucci creative director’s genius, and often what makes him so controversial, is that his high-fashion fantasy world is filled with normal people in seemingly normal clothes: Ravers in big baggy jeans, football lads in adidas tracksuits, dads in huge chunky sneakers. But this show specifically brings to mind the LA collection Demna presented during his Balenciaga tenure.
In 2023, he shut down a palm tree-lined street with views of the Hollywood sign to present his take on how the locals dress. It was the accessories that really brought the message home: uber-fit hikers clutched Balenciaga water bottles, athleisure-wearing Angelenos yapped on the phone while sipping from takeaway coffee cups, and multiple models shouldered Erewhon shopping bags.
Demna might now be in a different American metropolis on a different coast, and at the helm of a different fashion house, but he’s once again creating his version of a local. And it’s once again accessories that really tell the story.
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