Gucci for the People: A Times Square Takeover

NEW YORK — At 8.30pm sharp on Saturday night the huge digital billboards that endlessly illuminate Times Square — the iconic New York intersection that perfectly captures America’s obsession with consumer goods and marketing — began pushing a completely different offering to fashion insiders and the public alike.

Filling the screens was a new world of Gucci-fied product categories, including Gucci chocolate, Gucci water, Gucci pets, cars and longevity drugs… A business dream come true, complete with catchy slogans and hypnotic visuals that served as an intro to Demna’s first Cruise outing for the Italian mega-label but was also a sort of manifesto, the perfect conceptual framing for what came down the runway.

Demna’s recipe for revamping the long-ailing Gucci is becoming clear. The in-your-face sexuality of his February runway debut remained front and centre this evening, though the articulation was a little more nuanced. To be sure, the designer’s vision for Gucci isn’t particularly fashion-forward, but it offers the flashy, body-conscious nouveaux riches, who love luxury goods but don’t give a damn about subtlety, exactly what they want.

Tonight’s collection was called “GucciCore” and leaned on “a stylistic cross-section of New York City” to deliver a “permanent wardrobe grounded in pragmatic, wearable pieces that are unmistakably Gucci,” the company said. It’s an approach many brands adopt in times of crisis. As simple as that, but not without further questions on the core of Gucci, a house rooted in leatherwork and accessories with as many fashion identities as the creative directors who have occupied its pilot’s seat.

According to Demna, the core of Gucci lies in the work of Tom Ford and the show opened with sharp, form-fitting suiting that was a clear homage to Ford’s extra-powerful mid-1990s Gucci, then moved into more personal territory for Demna: his distortion of the classics; his appreciation for a good bourgeois chemisier and mock-couture dress; his proclivity for dressing characters taken from real life.

Character studies are something the designer did brilliantly at Balenciaga, but that sense of brilliance has faded some. The irony, say, of Paris Hilton as a Milanese sciura, felt too easy and more than a little stale; the way the characters were sketched out was a little formulaic; and the humour had something cheap about it.

In this market, designing to sell makes plenty of sense. Gucci for the people? Genius. The outing will surely trigger demand. But ultimately it felt like a quick fix: as urgent but fast-forgettable as an advertisement looping on a Times Square billboard.