Summary:
- Demna Gvasalia presented his first collection for Gucci at Milan Fashion Week, titled Primavera.
- The collection focuses on wearability and body-aware shapes, with seamless garments, hybrid silhouettes, and new footwear.
- The soundtrack, curated by Loki across five genres, was chosen to reflect the mix of references in the show.
Demna Gvasalia showed his first collection for Gucci during Milan Fashion Week. The Georgian designer, previously at Balenciaga for nearly a decade, brought a different approach to a house built on Italian craftsmanship and heritage dressing. The show took place in a large, museum-like space with classical statuary, a setting that framed the clothes in contrast to their contemporary direction.
Gvasalia named the collection Primavera. In his own words, the work is a set of stylistic propositions aimed at the people Gucci already addresses and those he wants the brand to reach going forward. The focus is on product. He said it himself: silhouettes, textures, materials. The clothes do not ask you to decode them. They are built to be worn.
The silhouettes run close to the body. Several pieces are seamless, with heat-sealed edges replacing stitching at the seams. Hems are engineered with a curved finish. Jackets appear frequently throughout the collection, in low-cut versions with horizontal pockets that read as streetwear-adjacent without committing fully to that register. Tracksuits take on new proportions. Leggings and trousers are combined into single pieces. Jackets and fitted tops merge into one-piece constructions. These are not experimental shapes for their own sake; they are the result of working with fabric and cut to remove anything unnecessary from the garment.
Comfort and ease show up in the tailoring as much as the more casual pieces. The collection moves between categories without drawing much attention to the transitions. A jacket that would work in an office is not far from one that works walking somewhere else. That range is deliberate.
Footwear carries a lot of the collection's identity. The Manhattan is Gvasalia's first sneaker design for Gucci. It takes a basketball shoe silhouette and reduces it to its minimum, then adds a slip-on construction borrowed from the mocassino format. The result is a shoe that sits somewhere between sport and ease, without the branding weight usually attached to either. Two loafers, the Giovanni and the Cupertino, move away from the rigidity of traditional leather dress shoes. The construction softens the shoe so it follows the foot rather than holding it in place.
The show's soundtrack was put together by Loki, described as pulling from five separate genres. The music shifted across the presentation, moving between classical and contemporary references, which matched the pace of the clothes themselves. Nothing on the runway stayed in one category for long.
Gvasalia's arrival at Gucci comes after Sabato De Sarno's departure from the house in early 2025. The appointment was confirmed in February 2025, and the Milan show marks his public debut in the role. He now runs both Gucci's creative direction and continues to hold his position at Balenciaga, making this a rare dual tenure at two major houses under the same parent company, Kering.
The collection does not announce itself loudly. It asks fewer questions than his Balenciaga work often did, and it leans into function without reducing the clothes to purely utilitarian territory. Whether this direction holds for future seasons is something the next shows will answer.