When Kering announced on March 13, 2025, that Demna Gvasalia would become Gucci’s new artistic director, the market responded before the fashion industry could. Kering’s shares fell 10% by the end of trading that Friday — a €4.25 billion erasure of market value in a single session. While the fashion world is still processing the news, investors had already delivered their verdict.

It was, in a way, a very Demna moment: maximum disruption, instant polarization, and a creeping suspicion that no one quite knew what would come next.

That suspicion has only deepened as the appointment has moved from announcement to reality. Demna officially joined Gucci in July 2025. His first collection, La Famiglia, was released in September — not as a runway show, but as a lookbook and short film. A deliberate sidestep of the industry’s most reliable standard.

Eleven months later, on February 27, 2026, the suspicion met its first real answer. Inside Milan’s Palazzo delle Scintille — a 1923 exhibition hall clad in travertine marble and populated with replica sculptures from the Uffizi and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli — Demna held what he insisted on calling not a fashion show but a “birthday.” The birthday of his vision for Gucci. And in a move that crystallized everything this appointment has always been about, he chose to close it with Kate Moss in a shimmering, with its back scooping down so low to reveal a double-G diamond-encrusted logo thong. A direct citation of Tom Ford’s incendiary Spring 1997 G-string, one of the most culturally loaded garments in modern fashion history.

The crowd in attendance erupted. The internet, per usual, was even louder. Whether the cash registers will follow is still, as of this writing, entirely unclear.