Gucci lost €3.4 billion in three years. I've been looking at the Demna appointment less as a creative decision and more as a timing one.

At its peak the brand did €10.5B annually. 2025 closed closer to €6B. Operating income down 51% year-on-year, wholesale revenue in Q4 2024 down 53%, Kering carrying €10.5B in net debt at year end. When numbers move that quickly the internal conversation inside a company changes. It stops being about creative direction and starts being about which levers have actually demonstrated the ability to reverse that kind of pressure at scale.

Demna has a documented answer to that question. When he arrived at Balenciaga in 2015 the house was doing €390M. By 2021 they filed €1.189B with net income tripling in a single year. By 2023 analyst estimates put them past $2B. The growth wasn't built on spectacle, it was built on repetition. The Triple S didn't disappear after one season. The Speed Trainer became a permanent fixture. The Hourglass developed into a shape you could identify without reading the logo. Repeatable objects that generated consistent sell-through across quarters, not just one press cycle. And when Demna left, his successor went back to the Triple S and launched a second rendition. That's what a real product engine looks like. It outlives the person who built it.

I wasn't wowed by Primavera and I've thought about whether that matters. I don't think it does, because I don't think the show was designed to wow people like me. It was designed to locate a specific customer and communicate clearly that Gucci is for them now.

There's been a lot of noise about the Tom Ford comparisons, people saying all Demna did was lift Ford's era wholesale — the body-consciousness, the sexuality, the slinky silhouettes, the casting of Kate Moss. I understand why it reads that way on the surface but that conversation tends to be selective about where it starts the timeline. Tom Ford arrived at a Gucci that was in serious financial difficulty, tasked with reinterpreting the house's heritage for a new decade and a new buyer, which is almost exactly the brief Demna has been handed now. And Ford's aesthetic didn't emerge from nowhere either. The Studio 54 glamour, the 70s sexuality, the particular brand of sleek minimalism he became associated with all had antecedents. Hedi Slimane drew from Ford. Riccardo Tisci drew from Ford. Anthony Vaccarello drew from Ford. Most designers working in a certain register of luxury have Ford's fingerprints somewhere in their work whether they name it or not. Every generation of fashion is in conversation with the one before it, and the copying accusation almost always depends on where you choose to begin the story.

What Demna is doing feels closer to what Ford actually did than the criticism gives him credit for. He's going back to a set of coordinates that demonstrably worked, trying to understand why they worked commercially, and remaking them for a completely different cultural moment and a completely different buyer. Ford's Gucci belonged to a particular world, minimalist architecture, exclusive nightlife, erotica as aspiration, a very specific idea of who the desirable person was. That world still exists but it doesn't hold the same cultural centre of gravity it once did. Demna's version has fakemink and Nettspend walking the runway. The reference point is the same but the translation is doing real work.

To the people whose only framework for evaluating this is originality, and I say this with respect because originality does matter and it's genuinely what builds the cultural foundation that makes a product desirable in the first place, but it's worth asking an honest question: are you the one actually buying these pieces, or are you tapping the like button and moving on? Because Gucci is a for-profit company. It has always been a for-profit company. The runway exists to generate desire but desire has to convert into revenue or nothing else matters, and right now the gap between where Gucci is and where it needs to be is not a gap that gets closed by critical admiration alone. A brand that has shed €3.4 billion in revenue over three years doesn't have the luxury of making work purely for the audience that appreciates it intellectually and then moves on without spending. It needs the people who open their wallets, and it needs them consistently across multiple price points.

Which is the whole point of the accessible tier and why it exists across every serious luxury business. Armani built Exchange. Versace had Versus. Prada has Miu Miu. Ferrari engineers the entry V8 before anyone gets near the V12. It's not dilution of what the brand stands for, it's how the top of the pyramid gets funded. Through volume in bags, shoes, sunglasses, fragrance, rings, entry clothing, accessories. The objects someone reaches for before they can afford the runway, the things that let them into the brand at the level they're at right now. The logo carries the same cultural weight at €600 as it does at €6000, it just reaches a much wider group of people, and that group is where the margin accumulates over time.

That's the tier Primavera was really speaking to. fakemink paused mid-walk to pull a phone from a Gucci monogram fanny pack, and that image communicated something very specific about who the brand is courting right now. Nettspend walked the runway, not sat in the front row, actually walked it in the clothes. Fimiguerrero, EsDeeKid, artists who largely avoid traditional press but have the kind of organic reach on TikTok and SoundCloud that a paid media budget can't manufacture at the same level of credibility. Demna said backstage that cultural relevance always starts with underground culture rather than the mainstream, and the casting was the most straightforward execution of that belief he could have made.

The soundtrack moved from drill and grime and hyperpop into a 1964 Ornella Vanoni ballad partway through the show, and the way those two things sat next to each other without one cancelling the other out was the same argument the clothes were making, just through a different channel. Underground energy and Italian heritage occupying the same space without needing to resolve the tension between them.

Kering shares fell when the appointment was announced. The confidence in the hire as a legitimate recovery strategy came later, once the internal logic became clearer to people outside the building. This wasn't a decision made from a position of strength. It was made from significant contraction, and understanding that changes how you read everything that came after it.

The margin recovery won't come from the runway pieces. It'll come from the bags, the shoes, the sunglasses, the fragrance, the rings, the full accessible tier that people enter the brand through. And it probably doesn't require completely reinventing anything. The Triple S wasn't a wholly original concept, chunky sneakers existed before Demna got to them. What he did was make the version that fit what buyers and culture were ready for at that specific moment, and then he let it stay. That's possibly the more useful frame for thinking about what comes next at Gucci. Not what's entirely new, but what already exists in the house that can be made to feel necessary to today's buyer, today's market, today's people pushing culture forward. The Jackie has been in the catalogue for decades. The Jordaan has been there for decades. The question is whether one of them gets that moment where it stops being a catalogue item and becomes something people actually need to have.

Whether something from this era of Gucci eventually outlives it is the only metric that will tell us if this worked.