Demna is the New Designer at Gucci

Demna is leaving Balenciaga to grow to be the brand new creative director of Gucci, tasked with jolting the Italian vogue home out of its doldrums with a gust of robust creativity.

“Demna will deliver to Gucci one thing distinctive. His approach of defining vogue right this moment is fairly distinctive, and that is what Gucci deserves and desires for the long run,” Gucci chief government officer Stefano Cantino stated, chatting with a clutch of reporters summoned to the Paris headquarters of Gucci’s father or mother firm Kering for the announcement.

“We’re in settlement that Demna is among the greatest artistic administrators of his era, with none doubt,” he added. “He has confirmed his functionality to reshape Balenciaga throughout his tenure, its identification and, in fact, its vogue standpoint.”

At Cantino’s facet was Francesca Bellettini, Kering deputy CEO accountable for model growth, who famous Demna would wrap his tenure at Balenciaga with an high fashion present on July 6 and begin at Gucci shortly after.

It has but to be decided when the Georgian designer may unveil his first assortment for Gucci.

Forward of him lies “a holistic work across the model,” Bellettini burdened.

She additionally brushed away all questions on Demna’s eventual successor at a home he’s made synonymous with hoodies, outsized tailoring, heavy-soled sneakers, and hype collaborations – together with one with Gucci in 2021.

Demna succeeds Sabato De Sarno, who exited Gucci in early February after a two-year collaboration. The autumn 2025 vogue present in Milan on Feb. 25 was introduced by the model’s design workplace.

Thursday’s announcement got here on the tail finish of a vogue month rife with artistic upheaval, and rampant hypothesis about who would in the end land at Gucci, one of the crucial troubled megabrands in right this moment’s luxurious panorama.

Demna’s appointment units the stage for one more bumper crop of designer debuts, with Matthieu Blazy slated to indicate his first ready-to-wear assortment for Chanel, and Jonathan Anderson stated to be headed for Dior, although nothing is official but.

Each Kering and LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, father or mother of Dior, appear to be inserting bets in placing their strongest horse on their largest and most vital manufacturers.

Different European manufacturers with new designers but to indicate their first collections embody Versace, the place Dario Vitale is succeeding Donatella Versace; Jil Sander, which simply employed Simone Bellotti from Bally; Celine, now beneath Polo Ralph Lauren alum Michael Rider; Maison Margiela, which is able to now be helmed by Glenn Martens; Bottega Veneta, the place Louise Trotter succeeded Blazy, and Carven, the place Mark Howard Thomas succeeded Trotter as its director of design.

Extra modifications are additionally stated to be looming at Loewe, Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier, to call however just a few.

To make certain, many eyes can be on Gucci, which has been shedding steam for the reason that 2022 exit of artistic director Alessandro Michele, who ignited a renaissance on the model that lifted it to just about 10 billion euros in revenues – till the market grew fatigued together with his exuberant, retro-tinged designs.

With De Sarno as Michele’s successor, the model has been pursuing an elevation technique, and, as reported, administration had been pinning its hopes on the introduction of latest purse strains, a shorter time to market and a streamlined distribution and provide.

Nevertheless, De Sarno’s collections had been met with combined opinions and his timeless tackle signature items didn’t acquire sufficient traction for a turnaround.

Fairness analysts have been pressuring Gucci to call a high-profile designer to assist revitalize the model and regain market prominence.

Gucci reported a 24 % drop in natural revenues within the three months to Dec. 31, worse than the 23 % decline forecast by analysts. In 2024, the model accounted for 63 % of father or mother Kering’s working revenue.

Most of Kering’s luxurious manufacturers additionally noticed natural gross sales weaken within the fourth quarter. Saint Laurent was down 8 %, and the “different homes” group, which incorporates Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, reported a 4 % decline. 

Final month, Kering chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault assured traders that the group had “reached an inflection level, and that after a 12 months of stabilization in 2025 we are going to progressively resume a trajectory of regular and more and more worthwhile progress.

“Gucci will come again. I’ve completely no doubts about this,” he added.

In a joint Kering-Balenciaga press launch, issued Thursday after the shut of buying and selling on the Paris Bourse, Pinault stated: “Demna’s contribution to the business, to Balenciaga, and to the group’s success has been large. His artistic energy is precisely what Gucci wants. As I thank him for all the things he has achieved over the previous 10 years, I sit up for seeing him form Gucci’s new creative path.”

For his half, Demna stated: “I’m really excited to affix the Gucci household. It’s an honor to contribute to a home that I deeply respect and have lengthy admired. I sit up for writing along with Stefano and the entire crew a brand new chapter of Gucci’s superb story.”

Throughout the briefing, Bellettini and Cantino touted Demna’s capabilities.

Bellettini stated Demna was instantly keen about Gucci and got here up with a compelling proposal “to make the model cool and related.”

The designer subsequently trolled by way of archives of the Italian model, which dates to 1921, and favored what he noticed.

“We imagine in his functionality of mixing such a robust heritage with an unbelievable vogue contact,” Cantino stated, additionally lauding Demna’s means to interpret the up to date tradition and outline “what’s luxurious right this moment for younger generations and, in fact, for the long run.”

Requested about Demna’s penchant for darkish, dystopian themes and an underground sensibility, Cantino assured that the designer wouldn’t transpose his Balenciaga aesthetic: “His intention is to do at Gucci one thing that’s proper for Gucci.”

Looking back, his fall 2025 present for Balenciaga, extra approachable than typical, might be learn as an illustration by Demna that he can design an easy males’s swimsuit, an opulent girl’s coat, and fewer bombastic equipment.

He even donned a black swimsuit and gown shirt as a substitute of his typical grubby hoodies and T-shirts for the backstage scrum after that present, declaring, “Perhaps I’m like Demna model 2.0; Perhaps I grew up sufficient to put on a swimsuit as a designer.”

Cantino and Bellettini additionally took pains to explain the essential groundwork laid forward of Demna’s arrival, together with manufacturing efficiencies, high quality enhancements, higher supply instances and expertise upgrades throughout the group.

“Now the corporate may be very able to ignite, to maintain and to offer very robust creativity the prospect to shine,” Bellettini stated.

Requested about De Sarno’s legacy at Gucci, she known as his contribution “immense.”

De Sarno was an out of doors rent, recruited from Valentino, the place he rose to the place of vogue director overseeing each males’s and ladies’s collections. The Naples-born designer additionally labored at Prada and Dolce & Gabbana earlier in his profession.

At Gucci, De Sarno labored beneath three completely different CEOs – Marco Bizzarri and Jean-François Palus got here earlier than Cantino – and with a revolving door of promoting and communications executives together with Robert Triefus, Susan Chokachi, Alessio Vannetti and now Valérie Leberichel.

In up to date instances, Gucci has usually promoted designers from inside. Michele was an affiliate of one-time artistic director Frida Giannini, who herself labored beneath Tom Ford, the designer broadly credited with reviving the model throughout his tenure from 1995 to 2004.

In keeping with sources, contenders to succeed Demna at Balenciaga might embody Pieter Mulier, who has heated up Alaïa to the boiling level, and Daniel Roseberry, thus far probably the most profitable artistic director at Schiaparelli, having led the couture home into ready-to-wear.

Born in Georgia, Demna studied worldwide economics at Tbilisi State College earlier than he enrolled in Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Wonderful Arts, which spawned the unique Antwerp Six within the early Eighties.

He graduated with a grasp’s diploma in vogue design in 2006, later that 12 months collaborating with Walter van Beirendonck, one of many Six, on his males’s collections.

He joined Margiela in 2009 after the maverick Belgian founder retired and was accountable for the ladies’s collections. In 2013, he moved over to Louis Vuitton, the place he was senior designer of ladies’s ready-to-wear collections, initially beneath Marc Jacobs and briefly beneath Nicolas Ghesquière.

But it surely was his Vetements venture — cofounded in 2014 together with his brother Gurum Gvasalia — that thrust him onto the worldwide radar with an emotionless, different model of cool.

He ignited a streetwear juggernaut that had a large affect on vogue: Quickly his extra-long sleeves and monster shoulders had been everywhere in the runways, and $800 hoodies with wry slogans or logos turned covetable objects for sneaker heads and fashionistas alike.

He joined Balenciaga in 2015 and didn’t change his stripes, gleefully and brazenly appropriated signposts of client tradition, taking a sociological strategy to analyzing what triggers client need, and stretching the boundaries of what’s thought of luxurious and stylish.

With black fingernails and facial scruff in his debut years, Demna was seen as a ringleader for all issues underground and different, exalting the grittier parts of Paris in his collections, together with jolts of S&M and punk, seen in kinky face hoods and spiky sun shades.

He stepped down at Vetements in 2019, stating that he achieved his “mission of a conceptualist and design innovator at this distinctive model.”

Armed with Balenciaga’s mightier budgets, he emerged as certainly one of vogue’s consummate showmen, staging gripping runway spectacles in units evoking submerged stadiums, a grand parliament, or an enormous pit of mud.

There have been darkish moments, nonetheless. Demna and the home of Balenciaga was engulfed in disaster on the finish of 2022 and properly into 2023 over promoting photos that critics claimed condoned the exploitation of youngsters.

Demna’s two-way collaboration Gucci in 2021 was characterised as “hacking” one another’s assortment.

Michele unveiled a Gucci assortment that included interpretations of the silhouettes and symbols of Demna’s Balenciaga, whereas Demna provided a spread of “conceptual interpretations of Gucci‘s recognizable signatures as Balenciaga merchandise.”

On the time, Demna advised WWD what a thrill it was to “vandalize a bit” a Gucci tote bag with a message in black spray paint. “I had the pleasure of doing that on the prototype.”