The rapid turnover of executives and creative directors at major luxury brands during the past 18 months has left some of the biggest names in fashion in a state of limbo. And nowhere has that been more apparent than on the opening days of Milan Fashion Week.
After Sabato De Sarno’s sudden exit this month, Gucci’s design team presented the brand’s autumn/winter women’s and men’s collections. Although its sales declined 21 per cent on a reported basis to €7.7bn between 2023 and 2024, Gucci is still a big brand. And it still pulls in the star power — the front row included Gucci’s latest advertising campaign stars Jessica Chastain, Julia Garner and the tennis men’s world number one Jannik Sinner — and staged its show in Superstudio Maxi, one of the largest event venues in Milan. It’s a big job, too, for whichever designer will take over — analysts are pressuring the brand to hire a high-profile name, bucking a long Gucci tradition of appointing unknown talent and catapulting them to stratospheric fame.
For this show, Gucci’s design team took the opportunity to double-down on the brand’s tried and tested signatures and iconographies, in a collection that was, understandably, about emphasising Gucci’s Gucci-ness, re-emphasising the power and pull of that name with or without a creative director.
If De Sarno’s Gucci stripped out the whimsy and playfulness of former creative director Alessandro Michele — just as Michele, in turn, had obliterated the sultry sexiness that had hung over the brand from its period under Tom Ford in the 1990s — this collection played both those aesthetics off one another. Ford’s era seemed the focus — it does swift trade with vintage dealers — and the opening shearling Chubby jacket was a wink to one debuted in an acclaimed Studio 54-inspired collection in 1996, alongside iterations of the double G-logo in devoré velvet and a giant horsebit belt from 1995.
Accessories throughout were strong, hewing close to brand codifications — the 1955 bag was revived, alongside bamboo-handled totes for women, while male models carried a Gucci duffle by the tip of its zip, as if they’d pinched them straight from the archive. A hobo in hairy Mongolian lamb with a fat metal horsebit was the perfect meeting point of quirky oddness and reassuring, recognisable brand identity.
Designer Glenn Martens has just succeeded John Galliano as creative director of Maison Margiela, in addition to ongoing duties at the Italian denim behemoth Diesel. Martens’ collection for the latter was decidedly more polished, as if prepping for his forthcoming debut at a heritage couture house, albeit an unconventional one.
A “trashed” Coco Chanel and Queen Elizabeth II were his jokey references for a decidedly Diesel-ish cavalcade of smashed-up and distressed denim, this season woven into scraggly houndstooth patterns to give a dressier vibe. “A bit more elevated,” said Martens, although he insisted that even a cocktail dress at Diesel should be thrown on the floor rather than reverently handled.
The opening looks played with actual tweed, and with wool suiting — Martens said that Diesel had nailed Gen Z, and Millennials are now after “soft tailoring” from the brand, although it was raw cut and bonded to neoprene. If those were Millennial-ready, Gen Z may be entranced by Martens’ iteration of low-riding “bumster” skirts and jeans, riffing on more late-’90s nostalgia, albeit here with built-in underwear to “wedgie” garment to body.
Taking that idea to an extreme, a final sequence literally plastered folded shirts to the torso with the kind of adhesive used for wound dressing. “We’re a brand all about marketing, so here the body is a billboard,” said Martens. But, actually, under his stewardship the brand has become about inventive design too. And it’s selling — in a tough year for luxury, Diesel posted a 3.2 per cent increase in sales between 2023 and 2024, crediting a repositioning strategy that place Martens’ design innovation at the forefront of the brand. There’s even a denim-nylon jacquard that, he said, the brand was considering seeking patent for.
Dean and Dan Caten should patent their showmanship — it’s what makes their Dsquared2 runway presentations such pleasures to attend. Eschewing their usual spot on the men’s calendar for the wider audience of womenswear to celebrate their 30th year in business, they opened with 2025 Grammy Award-winning rapper Doechii dressed in a mash-up of Canuck outdoorsy camping garb with slithery glam evening dress. Those contrasting halves nodded to the whole span of their work over three decades, as well as the ever-varied content of this blockbuster show. Each exit was a mini-vignette, with models dressed like Tom of Finland characters, Seventies lotharios or campily made-up as a dead-ringer for Cher. If that sounds bananas, it was, but also incredible fun and unmistakably Dsquared2. As a branding exercise, it was hard to beat.
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