Demna’s latest Gucci show took place inside a store that wasn’t real.

For his Sept. 25 spring 2027 presentation in Milan, Gucci transformed a convention center into a replica boutique, down to the low-slung velvet seats. The set was built to represent Demna’s concept for the brand’s future retail spaces, putting retail design in his creative brief.

That is considerable power for a designer who joined as artistic director in July 2025, with the house already deep in a sales slump. Gucci’s annual revenue fell from 10.5 billion euros (about $11.8 billion) in 2022 to just under 6 billion euros in 2025. The decline has since eased. In the first half of 2026, Gucci revenue fell another nine percent to 2.76 billion euros, but second-quarter revenue was down just 3 percent. Sales at directly operated stores improved by seven percentage points from the first quarter on a comparable basis. 

Demna’s changes have extended well beyond a new silhouette, reaching Gucci’s sampling process, sizing and stores.

One of his first moves was easy to miss from the front row. Gucci’s prototypes had been sewn off-site. Demna created an atelier inside its Milan studio, allowing garments to be made and altered on-site rather than sending the work elsewhere. Vogue reported that the change lets his team work directly on samples with pins and scissors and move more quickly from one iteration to the next.

He has applied the same attention to how a garment moves on a person. During a studio visit, Vogue reported that Demna handled coats designed to feel unexpectedly light and handbags made lighter and more supple. He is also developing a new sizing system intended to preserve a look’s proportions across different body types rather than simply grading a runway sample up or down. Many pieces in the cruise collection already exist in three different fits. “I’m not a good designer if I can only make clothes for models,” he told Vogue.

Demna spent a decade at Balenciaga, making the house a subject of cultural conversation. At Gucci, he inherited a different challenge: more than a century of recognizable codes, from the horsebit to the flamboyance of the 1970s and the sensuality of the Tom Ford years. So far, he has pulled those references apart and recombined them instead of simply reviving past Gucci eras.

Rather than declaring one definitive Gucci woman or man, Demna has been testing a range of characters. He introduced La Famiglia in September 2025 through a character-driven lookbook and the short film The Tiger. His February 2026 runway debut pushed closer to the body and drew heavily on Gucci’s 1990s sensuality. In May, his resort 2027 show in Times Square took “GucciCore”—his take on the house’s staples—to New York.

The spring 2027 show brought those experiments together. There were equestrian looks, boarding-school uniforms gone deliberately unruly, peaked tailoring and fluid evening dresses. Demna told Vogue backstage that it had taken him a year to understand what Gucci meant to him. The result moved easily among several ideas of Gucci.

Then there was the store. Vogue reported that the replica boutique represented Demna’s concept for Gucci’s future retail spaces, taking his authorship beyond the seasonal collection.

The replica boutique was a useful statement of how far Demna’s influence now reaches. Demna can shape the room, the garment and even the client he imagines inhabiting the same world. Whether enough real customers want to enter that world—and spend there—will determine whether Gucci’s improving trajectory becomes a turnaround.

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