Demna-Gvasalia

On Saturday 16 May 2026, Demna staged the gucci cruise 2027 times square show on a runway laid down the centre of Broadway between 46th and 48th Streets, with Gucci taking over roughly fifty surrounding skyscraper-mounted screens to do it. The pre-show video began at 8:30 p.m. local time and intercut nature footage with mock product ads — Gucci Time, Gucci Life, Gucci Acqua, Gucci Gym, Palazzo Gucci Hotel — before Cindy Crawford closed the collection in a black feathered gown and Tom Brady walked it head-to-toe in leather. The show ran behind high black barriers while Midtown traffic, sirens, and honking continued outside. Read against Demna’s first Gucci outing at Memoria seven months earlier, this was the inversion of that 4th-century Milanese basilica: a deliberate move from sacred silence to commercial saturation, staged on the most over-photographed intersection in the world. ...

The cruise 2026 creative director turnarounds are the season the post-Sarno, post-Kim-Jones, post-Tisci creative resets stop being announcements and start being read commercially. Demna at Gucci, Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Daniel Lee and Joshua Schulman at Burberry, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel have between them produced the most concentrated wave of artistic-director changes the four flagship houses of European luxury have ever shared in a single calendar year — and the Q1 2026 earnings prints arrived on the same desks as the cruise images. Business of Fashion’s 10 May briefing — “Gucci, Dior, Burberry: A Tale of Three Turnarounds” — named the three explicitly. The fourth, Chanel, is private and unrated; the fifth and sixth, Balenciaga and Versace, sit inside Kering and the Prada Group; and the cohort underneath them — Sarah Burton at Givenchy, Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier and Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela — extends the same logic down the holding-company chart. ...

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first Balenciaga collection, presented in Paris in October 2025, is the first time in 28 years that the house’s silhouette has retreated rather than advanced — the Ghesquière-to-Wang-to-Demna line, unbroken since 1997, ended on a runway that looked back to Cristóbal’s 1950s. The piccioli balenciaga debut is the most-watched test of Kering’s ReconKering plan because it is the only one of the group’s three creative-director changes where the new designer arrives without a brief to reset the brand’s commercial spine, only its image. CEO Gianfranco Gianangeli, in post since November 2024, and Deputy CEO Nathalie Raynaud, promoted in 2026, have already done the spine work: the Cagole, the Rodeo, the Bel Air, and the Le City revival did most of the un-streetwearing of Balenciaga before Piccioli arrived. What he inherits is a house whose leather goods are working and whose image needs a new sentence. ...

Eleven major fashion houses debut new creative directors between January 2025 and October 2026, the most concentrated changeover in luxury since Tom Ford left Gucci in April 2004. The fashion designer debuts 2026 wave touches every European holding company that matters — LVMH and Kering on the top of the chart, OTB, Puig and Clarins underneath, and a Prada Group that just spent $1.375 billion on Versace and is currently running it without a creative director at all. The roll call: Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe, Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Demna Gvasalia at Gucci, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela, Simone Bellotti at Jil Sander, Miguel Castro Freitas at Mugler, Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier, and a Versace seat that opens for Pieter Mulier on 1 July 2026. ...

On 16 April 2026, in Florence, Luca de Meo stood in front of investors for more than three hours and named the plan that will define the next four years at Kering: ReconKering. The Kering Florence strategy 2026 is a three-phase reset — structural fix by end-2026, rebuild to growth by end-2028, reclaim “Next Luxury” leadership by end-2030 — and it lands on four very different desks at once: Gucci under Demna Gvasalia, Bottega Veneta under Matthieu Blazy’s successor moment, Balenciaga in the post-Demna handover, and a beauty business that is no longer Kering’s at all after L’Oréal closed its $4.6 billion acquisition of Kering Beauté on 21 April 2026. This piece reads each of those four landings against the targets de Meo actually committed to in Florence, and against the Q1 2026 numbers that frame them. ...