By Samuel Hine

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This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.

On Tuesday evening, Milan Fashion Week got underway with a scene that felt more out of Hollywood. Outside the Italian stock exchange, the likes of Elliot Page, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ed Norton, Jin, Nettspend, and Demi Moore—in a showstopping embroidered gown that shined like an Oscar statuette—swanned for the cameras on an espresso-hued carpet. Inside was an opulent movie theater, where models clad in clingy tops and square-toed horsebit loafers took selfies in their seats. All were eagerly anticipating the world premiere of Gucci’s Demna era.
Then the lights went down and out came The Tiger, a madcap short film directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn, in which a dysfunctional dynastic fashion family accidentally ingests psychedelics in their champagne, forcing them to confront their deepest insecurities (while wearing baller suits and gowns and carrying beautiful handbags, of course).
Demna, who moved from Balenciaga to Gucci in July, sat in the audience alongside the directors. He was dressed in his customary black T-shirt and trousers, but the evening heralded a shift for the iconoclastic creative director—and maybe for fashion itself. For one, Demna recently moved to Los Angeles, which underscored the Tinseltown of it all. But the Gucci event was also the first creative reset in a two-week span where new designers are debuting at Jil Sander, Versace, Bottega Veneta, Loewe, Maison Margiela, Balenciaga, and Chanel. The question of the season is who can capture the zeitgeist again during a time when luxury fashion is essentially bombing at the box office.
Demna’s first Gucci collection, a bridge before he unveils his full vision on the runway in February, is woven throughout the film. In a lookbook that dropped on Monday in advance of the premiere, the collection—dubbed “La Famiglia”—is showcased in a series of 37 Catherine Opie-lensed portraits of the molto-Italiano archetypes who inhabit Demna’s new Gucci-verse, from “Principino” to “Bastardo.” The latter wears little more than a knotted white speedo, but most of the men in the new Gucci famiglia are dressed in slinky chest-baring shirts and wide low-rise trousers clasped with double-G belts, calling to mind the slick, sensual minimalism of Tom Ford’s radical tenure in the ’90s.Th
The collection will land in 10 Gucci stores around the world on September 25 as Demna seeks to turn around the house’s steadily declining sales. But what he clearly understands about the moment is that making exciting new clothes is only half the battle. Fashion has run on mass attention ever since Demna broke into the Paris scene with guerilla Vetements presentations, and his first order of business is to wrestle Gucci back to the center of conversation.
There was plenty of energy in the air at the post-screening dinner at Casa Cipriani. Heat lightning arced through the hazy night sky, dancing off Moore’s dress as she chatted with Paltrow on a balcony that quickly filled up with celebs and towering bodyguards. At the bar, Elliot Page, who appears in “The Tiger” as nepo failson Braxton Gucci, ordered a drink with Alia Shawkat, who plays a paramour from a rival ruling family that has just bought the state of Florida (the 30-minute film is deeply twisted and mildly Succession-esque).
“Obviously, Demna’s vision and his mind is pretty extraordinary and unique,” said Page, who hit the red carpet in Demna’s Balenciaga on several occasions over the years. “We’ve both been friends with Spike for a really long time,” Page continued, “so the thought of getting to work with Spike, and also Halina of course, and then the cast that came together, how could you say anything but—”
“Hell yes!” Shawkat offered.
“It’s a foundation, you know?” Demna noted as dinner got underway. Nearby, models from “La Famiglia” milled about, the “Nerd” in his slim leather blazer and retro knit top smoking a cig with “Androgino,” who was wearing a skin-grazing sheer top. The designer added that Jonze and Reijn (of Babygirl fame) had total creative freedom over the film. The only mandate he gave them was a brief about a matriarch and her family and the lookbook. “I almost had to realize for myself the message of the film while making it, which was to give up control,” Demna said.
“The Tiger” is a high-budget fashion promo, sure, but it’s also the latest evolution of one of Demna’s soundest creative instincts, which is to expose the fashion establishment’s ridiculousness by holding up a funhouse mirror. (Like the time he made an entire Balenciaga Couture collection out of “streetwear” garments.) Demi Moore plays Barbara Gucci, a high-strung matriarch and designer who has invited a legendary Vanity Fair writer (a perfectly cast Ed Harris) to see her new collection (“La Famiglia”) and stay for a birthday banquet amidst a looming global catastrophe. Then real disaster strikes when a Gucci daughter (Keke Palmer) doses the libations with a trippy tincture.
On the balcony following the screening, guests wondered aloud what would happen to this party if someone dosed the champagne coupes. (Sequel alert!) Fai Khadra raised his glass to Alex Consani, who played the fur coat-swaddled “La Bomba” in the lookbook and the film, in which she swaggily delivered one of the best lines: “I’m the young, hot, rich bitch.”
“I think she came up with that one herself,” Khadra joked.
You could tell the film was made by fashion outsiders who share Demna’s healthy skepticism of the industry’s haughty traditions. A favorite moment was when Page melts down over a black tie dress code faux pas with the gravity of a Shakespearean soliloquy. As Demna told Vogue, “Her is probably one of my favorite movies, conceptually. And I really wanted to work with someone who could bring a strong artistic dimension to it. So it’s not an ad, it has a depth and artistic point of view.”
Against the mess that the industry finds itself in—a crisis of overly serious, blah-blah clothes—it was hard not to see a metaphor in the catastrophe looming over the Gucci family dinner. Amidst the chaos, Ed Harris asks Demi Moore, “Why fashion?” A look of stone-cold fear on her face, she replies, “I don’t know.” Exactly! Demna seems to be suggesting that if Gucci, or any brand at the pinnacle of the luxury establishment, can’t poke fun at itself, why take it seriously at all?
As the party wound down, guests couldn’t help but speculate about how Demna will wow us come February. “It’s like taking a sip of dosed champagne,” mused Devon Lee Carlson. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.” So far, at least, Gucci’s new auteur has a hit on his hands.