If you saw Gucci taking over Times Square screens and thought it was AI, you were wrong. Presenting its biggest show to date, Demna showcased the Gucci Cruise 2027 collection under the name of GucciCore, not in a borrowed gallery or a velvet-roped palazzo, but in the most commercially charged, visually saturated block of real estate on the planet.
As the sun set behind Midtown Manhattan's steel and glass monoliths, Demna shut down Times Square and turned it into a living spectacle, something that Demna's known for doing. A star-studded line-up including Kim Kardashian, Mariah Carey, Shawn Mendes, Lindsay Lohan, Iman, Alix Earle, Stormzy, and Ivy Getty congregated not only in the front row but also on the runway: Tom Brady walked in head-to-toe leather; Paris Hilton, in an amber-yellow dress cinched with a red and green Gucci belt; and Cindy Crawford shut the whole thing down in a black strapless feathered gown.
The choice of New York carried deep symbolic weight; Gucci opened its first store outside Italy in New York in 1953, marking the beginning of its global rise. Demna leaned into that history hard, titling the collection GucciCore and framing it as a foundation rather than a seasonal flash. Demna also took inspiration from New York's various archetypes (yes, a La Famiglia continuation): the cycling city boys, the yoga mat-toting working girls, the women dolled up for a night out and the guys swaggering about in their wake; basically, everything was Guccified.
Across sixty-three looks, GucciCore arrived as the fourth and most complete act of Demna's character studies at the house, synthesising the visual languages of La Famiglia, Generation Gucci, and Primavera into one sharp, cohesive wardrobe. The silhouettes were precise and deliberate: pinstriped business suiting for the Madison Avenue stockbroker, shearling coats, slouchy denim and soft tailoring for the downtown skater, feathered gowns and pantsuits for the uptown socialite. The house codes were everywhere, recontextualised rather than simply reproduced, like the Web stripe reborn as a bandeau top or the Horsebit placed as a stirrup on severe heeled boots with metal-tipped stilettos.
The bags were also a key part of the show: leather handbags in inky tones and jewel-like touches, classic styles elevated while others made their runway debut: a box-shaped bag or even a wristwatch clutch with actual timepiece straps. GucciCore proposes a wardrobe elastic enough to contain the full complexity of city life — from the pragmatic to the extravagant — and that's a quietly radical idea for a luxury house, one where Demna pulls it off by anchoring everything in the one city that has always understood that tension better than anywhere else.
